My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 155: The Money Bought The Stranger Too and Then It Bought The Woman Watching Us

Dani brought it to him before breakfast.

She came in with the terminal already open and turned it to face him before she’d finished sitting down.

"The fourth delegate," she said. "I ran his credentials."

"And."

"His festival access wasn’t issued by the delegation office. It was purchased."

◆◆◆◆

Soren took the terminal.

The record was laid out in Dani’s usual order, the clean version on top and the messy proof under it, so he could read the conclusion first and check her work second if he wanted to.

He wanted to.

The delegate’s access had come through a broker. The broker routed through a reseller. The reseller routed through a shell with no history and one billing address.

He knew the shape before he reached the bottom of it.

"It’s the same network," Soren said.

"It’s the same network."

◆◆◆◆

The shell that had bought the delegate a seat on the floor was the same shell that had bought the fan-club its unnatural climb, the same shell that had bought the buyers their seating near the pack, the same shell that routed to the one office two floors up.

The foreign academy’s interest in Maren and the surveillance on Class Z were not two threads.

They were one channel with two things moving down it.

Soren sat with that.

The delegate who’d studied Maren as lineage instead of talent had reached her through the same money that had spent the winter watching all of them. Whoever wanted to know where the fox came from was paying the same account as whoever wanted Class Z filed.

That was not a coincidence sitting next to another coincidence anymore.

That was a structure.

◆◆◆◆

"How fast did you find this?" Soren said.

"Overnight. I pulled his credentials the second he left the floor."

He looked at her.

Dani held the look. She’d sat on a routing for eight days once, in a fall that felt like a long time ago now, and she’d decided somewhere in the winter that she was done being the reason a thing arrived late.

"You keep bringing me the hard ones fast," Soren said.

"I keep bringing you everything fast now."

"I noticed."

"Good." She took the terminal back. "Notice it."

◆◆◆◆

He added the delegate to the count in his head.

The count was long now. It had started in the fall as a handful of too-convenient timings he could hold in one hand, and it had grown all winter, and it no longer fit in one hand.

The fan-club climb. The hearing landing the same season the profile rose. The festival built as a stage. The buyers. The recovery language. The phantom draw from the east yard. And now a delegate who crossed a border on the same money, to look at his fire fox and ask her where her line began.

Every entry pointed the same direction.

He did not name the direction out loud, because Maren was two doors down still carrying a hole where a before should have been, and the last thing she needed was to hear that the man who’d opened the hole was funded by the same office that had been leaking her tamer into the ground.

◆◆◆◆

Two floors up, Voss was doing her own reading.

She did not know she was in the same records Dani had pulled.

The work in front of her was the ordinary work of a monitor. Reviewing the festival access logs. Checking who had come into the building and on whose authority. The dull backbone of the job nobody thanked her for, and the part of it she was best at, because a log did not lie to you if you knew how to read it.

She found the shell, the same shell Dani had found, by the same patient walk down through the layers.

Well hidden was not the same as hidden from Voss. She had spent a career in records other people thought were buried, and this one was buried no deeper than the rest.

She traced it in.

Down through the reseller. Down through the broker. Down to the billing address, where she recognized the office, because she filed her own nightly reports two floors up in that same building and had never once wondered who read them.

That was the first cold thing.

She had assumed, for as long as she’d held the post, that her reports climbed a chain and stopped somewhere clean. She had never checked the top of the chain. A monitor who checked the top of her own chain was a monitor asking to be reassigned.

◆◆◆◆

Then she found the credential list.

Every access the shell had purchased, itemized, names and seats and authorizations, the whole quiet machine of who had been bought into the festival.

She read down it.

The delegate was what she was hunting for, the anomaly, the guest who’d crossed a border and walked straight at a Class Z girl. She found him near the top.

And three lines under the delegate, in the same list, bought and paid by the same shell, she found her own reporting credentials.

◆◆◆◆

Voss stopped.

She read her own name where it should not have been.

Her credentials were not a monitor’s credentials in that list. They were an asset the shell had purchased, logged next to the delegate and the buyers and the bought press, one more access the office had paid for and now owned.

She had thought she served the academy.

She had thought her reports went up a chain that ended in the academy’s own governance, the ordinary spine of an ordinary institution.

Her reports went to the shell.

She was not a monitor who happened to feed an office. She was a thing the office had bought, itemized on the same list as the fame and the festival and the man who’d come to read a fox’s blood.

She sat with that for a long moment, and the shape of her whole career rearranged itself behind her eyes while her face did nothing at all.

Every report she’d filed. Every note she’d made on the Class Z boy and his pack across the winter. Every dutiful line she’d sent up the chain believing it went to people who answered to rules.

None of it had gone where she thought.

She had been careful her whole career. She had never fed a report to a party she couldn’t name. And she had been feeding the most important reports of her life to a party she’d never once thought to check, because the chain had looked ordinary and she had trusted ordinary.

Voss set the handheld down very carefully.

She did not make a note.

A career of making notes stood behind her, and for the first time in all of it she looked at a thing worth noting and decided the safest place to keep it was somewhere no log could reach.

Across the empty office, the nightly report queue blinked on the wall, waiting for tonight’s entry.