Page 67 of Mayhem

“I knew what you said, and I was listening until he started telling me he betrayed me to save me.” Echo’s mouth tightened as she looked toward the chair. “Then he tried to run. I put his head into your elevator, and after that the night developed organically.”

I stared at her until she had the decency to look mildly aware that the wording was insane. The anger was there, but exhaustion kept flattening it before I could do much with it. I had spent hours listening to my father dissect Aldrich, learned that he had once tried to absorb a favor operation at Westbridge that sounded increasingly familiar, and come home to find Echo covered in the blood of the man at the center of it. Somewhere in the middle of deciding which part of that deserved my attention first, I lost the energy to lecture her about obedience like either of us still believed she was going to become good at it.

“You know what? Fuck it.” I walked past her to the bar, poured two fingers of whiskey, and drank half before setting the glass down. “I’m tired of having the same argument where I tell you not to do something, you find a technically different way to do exactly that thing, and then I spend twenty minutes explaining intent to someone who understands intent perfectly well.”

Echo watched me from beside the table, blood drying in a smear down the front of her shirt. “That sounds like progress.”

“It isn’t permission to torture people in here whenever I leave for dinner.” I rubbed a hand over my face and looked at the stains spreading across the floor. “It means I’m accepting that whatever arrangement I thought I made with you stopped resembling reality several bad decisions ago.”

The elevator opened before she could decide whether to keep pushing. Ronan came through alone, jacket gone and his sleeves shoved up his forearms, with Nichlas’s blood streaked across one cuff. His usual stillness had sharpened into something colder, and he went directly to the sink to wash his hands before giving us the update.

“He’ll live. Doctor thinks the nose is broken, two fingers are a mess, the thigh wound needs stitches, and somebody put enough shallow cuts across him that he’s going to look like shit for a while.” Ronan dried his hands and gave Echo a long look over the towel. “Malakai stayed because Nichlas wakes up every few minutes and loses his mind when he realizes where he is.”

Echo folded her arms while Ronan’s gaze moved from the blood on her shirt to her face. “You put metal under his fingernails.”

She shrugged. “He survived.”

I held up a hand before they could turn the room into another exchange I did not have the patience to referee. “The dinner gave us something. Desmond mentioned an operation at Westbridge that the Quorum tried to absorb years ago. Two students, favor network, coded records. They got the records and never managed to take control of the operation.”

Echo went still enough that I knew the connection had landed before I finished.

Ronan crossed to my desk and pulled out his phone. “I started digging while Desmond was talking. The old acquisition inventory still exists, but most of it was transferred out of active files years ago. I found the storage reference before we got back and had someone pull the box while Malakai and I were getting Nichlas to the doctor.”

Echo’s attention stayed on him. “What box?”

“The one your ex apparently bought his life with.”

The answer stripped the last trace of amusement from her face. Ronan’s phone buzzed a few minutes later. He checked the screen, went back to the elevator, and returned with a narrow archive box that looked absurdly ordinary for something tied to this much blood. The old Quorum inventory number was still printed across one end. He set it on the coffee table and opened the lid carefully, moving through several folders before pulling out a worn black ledger.

Echo recognized it immediately, her shoulders changing before her expression did.

I took the book from Ronan and opened it near the middle. The pages were packed with dates, initials, short strings of numbers, abbreviated notes, symbols, and marks that clearly formed a system. A few entries were obvious enough to understand without help but most of them meant nothing beyond the fact that somebody had recorded an obligation.

Ronan sat on the edge of the table and read over another page. “This is structured, but it’s missing half the information required to use it. There are initials that repeat under unrelated entries, marks with no key, references to people who don’t appear anywhere else, and debts that say what was exchanged without identifying who actually owes it.”

“That’s because you don’t know what any of it means.” Echo came closer and held out her hand. “Give it to me.”

I kept the ledger long enough to look at the page again. Desmond had described exactly this. Records without control. An operation they acquired on paper and could never actually use.

“What does H-seven mean?” I asked.

Echo barely glanced down. “Harper family, seventh favor in their chain. That one was their oldest son. He needed disciplinary footage removed after he put another student in the hospital.”

Ronan turned several pages and pointed to a pair of initials written beside a triangle. “LM, triangle, two lines.”

“Lydia Mercer. The triangle means the favor originated through someone else instead of directly through us. Two lines means she owed twice because we had to use another contact to complete it.”

He moved again, picking something that looked even less useful. Echo answered without hesitation. She knew the alias behind the initials, what had been asked for, which person had connected the favor, and why the notation beside it changed who could collect.

I stopped letting Ronan test her after the fourth one.

“How much of this do you remember?”

Echo looked at me as though the question itself was strange. “All of it that mattered.”

“The names?”

“The real ones, yes. Most of the aliases too.” She took the ledger when I finally handed it over and flipped through pages she had not seen in years without needing time to orient herself. “The book was never supposed to explain itself. That would’ve been fucking stupid. If somebody stole it, they’d know there were favors and debts, but they wouldn’t know enough to walk into somebody’s life and collect.”