My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 148: The Broker Came Off Her Leash and Told Me To Be More Afraid, Not Less

Yara’s question was still in Soren’s head the next morning and he was still not answering it.

He was walking to the review wing when Cassidy Holt stepped out of a side corridor and blocked his path with her body.

Not obviously.

She stepped into the corridor at an angle that meant he’d have to move around her to keep going, and she did it while reading her handheld, so anyone glancing from either end would read her as a busy woman who had misjudged where she was standing.

"Walk with me," Cassidy said.

He walked with her.

That was how Cassidy worked.

You did not not walk with her when she asked.

Cassidy asking was a signal that something was moving, and refusing to hear what was moving was more expensive than hearing it.

◆◆◆◆

She took him down a service hall.

Not one of the main corridors.

A back one, service-only, gray tile and no windows, the sort of hall that ran between the wings for the maintenance staff.

She checked her handheld twice on the way in.

Cassidy was checking the log.

The academy corridors logged movement, in and out, and she was checking whether the log had noticed her yet.

"You’ll want to keep walking," she said. "Don’t stop until I say."

"Cassidy."

"Walk."

He walked.

◆◆◆◆

"The festival isn’t a festival," Cassidy said. "You know that. Your friend at the terminal has been mapping the purchases and she’s mapped them accurately, which is why I’m here now instead of where I’m supposed to be."

"You’ve been reading Dani’s traffic."

"I’ve been reading nothing. I’ve been told what she’s found by the office that reads what she’s found. That’s a different sentence and it matters."

Soren clocked that.

Cassidy was distinguishing between doing the surveillance and being briefed on it.

The distinction mattered to who she was and was not answerable to after this conversation.

He filed the distinction and asked nothing about it.

"Keep going," Soren said.

"The purchases route through a shell. The shell routes through an office. The office is drafting language."

"What kind of language."

"Recovery language."

◆◆◆◆

He didn’t ask her what for.

He wanted to.

He didn’t.

Cassidy watched him not ask.

"You already know," she said. "Or you’re guessing. It doesn’t matter which one it is."

"Say the word again."

"Recovery." Cassidy walked another two steps before she said the next thing. "Recovery is the word a certain kind of office uses when a thing is being removed from a place it is currently in and taken to a place it wasn’t in before. Recovery implies previous ownership. Recovery implies the thing was theirs already. That’s the frame the language is building."

"Recovery of what."

"That’s the part they’re being careful not to write down yet."

◆◆◆◆

Soren kept walking.

The pieces fell next to each other in his head and he let them fall, and Cassidy walked beside him and watched him let them fall.

The buried thing under the east yard.

The pylons.

Mona’s cold patch acquiring a direction the day the construction started.

The festival as public stage and physical disturbance at once.

An office drafting language that would call the thing they were about to pull out of the ground theirs by right.

He did not say any of it out loud.

Cassidy did not need him to.

◆◆◆◆

"Why are you telling me," Soren said.

"Because the office is drafting the language without my chain being briefed. Which means the office is running past me. Which means the arrangement I had with them is not the arrangement they have anymore."

"You’re protecting your position."

"I am always protecting my position."

"Then why not just leave."

Cassidy almost smiled.

Not a real smile.

The professional one, the one she used on buyers when a deal was going to close on terms she’d designed.

"Because the position I’m protecting isn’t with them," she said. "It’s with whoever is going to be standing after they finish recovering."

He stopped walking.

Cassidy did not stop.

She kept moving.

She looked back at him once, over her shoulder, without breaking stride.

"Keep up."

He kept up.

◆◆◆◆

"You framed it as your position twice," Soren said.

"Because it is."

"Once would have been enough for a lie. Twice is a woman making sure I know she isn’t being kind."

Cassidy did not answer immediately.

She checked her handheld again.

Two service turns had passed and the log still had not caught her being in a corridor she was not scheduled to be in, which meant she had built the window in advance, which meant she had come here with the window already open.

"If I told you I was being kind," she said finally, "you’d trust the warning less. You would spend the rest of the walk trying to work out what I wanted, and you would stop listening. So I told you the version of my reason that lets you stop looking at me and start looking at what I said."

"That’s still a kindness."

"It’s a professional courtesy. Different thing."

She said it flat.

She did not soften it.

Cassidy did not soften things.

That was the thing about her that Soren had learned in the fall.

Softness in Cassidy was a signal that the deal had turned.

Cold in Cassidy was a signal that the deal was still on.

Right now she was cold.

Right now the deal was still on.

◆◆◆◆

She led him through two more turns of the service hall and then she stopped at a maintenance door and did not open it yet.

"Last thing." She was looking at her handheld again. "Then I’m out."

"Go."

"I wasn’t sent this time."

Soren looked at her.

"That should scare you more, not less," Cassidy said. "Every previous conversation you and I have had, someone signed off on my having it with you. Someone I could have named if you’d asked. I would have named them. The naming was in the contract."

"And this one."

"This one nobody signed off on. Nobody assigned me. Nobody is expecting a readout on my desk in the morning. I came here on my own timing."

"Which means what?"

"Which means my chain is not running me anymore and if my chain is not running me, then it is running past me. And if it is running past me, then the person you used to have to convince to survive an office decision is not the last person you have to convince anymore. That person is above her now. And you don’t have a name for that person yet."

She put her hand on the maintenance door.

"You had a contact," Cassidy said. "You don’t anymore. Not because I’m cutting you off. Because the office already did."

She opened the door.

She stepped through it without looking back at him.

The door closed.

Soren stood in the empty service hall with a set of new numbers in his head, and none of them fit on the shelf he’d been keeping in his head from before, and he counted them anyway.

He was going to have to.