My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 167: Two Women Closed Their Books on Me and One of Them Left Me Hers

Cassidy Holt found him in the service corridor the day before the inquiry, which was how he knew the deal had turned, because Cassidy in a corridor was Cassidy off the record.

She fell into step without a greeting.

"The office is gone," she said. "Emptied over two nights. Furniture, terminals, the recovery-language drafts. The people I had arrangements with have stopped answering the arrangements."

"Your chain burned."

"My chain burned, and the smoke is headed for a hearing room, and I have spent a career making sure I’m never in a room when the smoke arrives." She checked her handheld, the habit, the window she’d built in advance. "So this is a courtesy call."

"Professional courtesy."

"Different thing than kindness. You remember."

He remembered.

◆◆◆◆

They walked two turns of the service hall, and she gave him what she’d come to give, itemized, because Cassidy delivered everything itemized, even a goodbye, even a warning she was handing over for free.

"Vasquez Senior attends tomorrow. In person. That’s confirmed, and it’s not for you, it’s for the delegation, because their footage of a grave under his academy is running on three continents and his name is on the festival charter."

"And the son?"

"Re-entered campus this morning under the father’s credential."

Cassidy didn’t slow down.

"He’ll speak. He’s been drafting all week. Word in what’s left of my chain is he’s going to put the incident on Class Z. Provocation theory. Your pack’s aggregate signature woke the thing up."

"That theory has a problem."

"It has several. He needs it to survive the room for one afternoon, not a review." S

he stopped at the maintenance door, her exit, always mapped before she entered.

"That’s the inventory. We’re settled."

"We were never unsettled."

"We were twice. I’m leaving with the account at zero." She looked at him a moment, cold, which meant the deal was still on, had always been on, would stay on wherever she landed next. "For what it’s worth, Kane. I came into this year to find the seam in your circle and price it. There wasn’t one. Do you know how rare that is, in my work?"

"Tell me."

"Once," Cassidy said. "In a career of pricing rooms. Once."

She went through the maintenance door, and it closed, and that was Cassidy Holt out of his year, walking toward whoever would be standing after the recovering finished, which had been her position from the start and the only honest thing about her, and honest was the wrong word, and he kept it anyway.

◆◆◆◆

Celia Ashcroft was waiting at the review corridor at their usual hour, except the review track had been suspended pending the inquiry and she was there anyway, gloved hand at her side, reading the empty posting board.

"They took our schedule down," she said, to the board.

"Everything’s the inquiry now."

"Everything was always the inquiry. They just hadn’t scheduled it yet." She turned, and she had a folder under her arm, thick, worn at the corners, carried a long way. "Walk with me. Last time."

They walked the track the review had put them on twice a week, and she didn’t say anything for half of it, and he let her not.

"I’m leaving after the hearing," Celia said finally. "Transfer’s already signed. A facility out west where they classify bearers like me full-time, which is a nicer way of saying they store us."

"You could fight it."

"I fought mine already. Years before you got here."

She flexed the gloved hand, once.

"You know what I held. You know what holding it cost. They finished writing my reports a long time ago, Kane. Yours are still being written. That’s the whole difference between us, and it’s the only one."

At the end of the corridor she stopped and held out the folder.

He didn’t take it right away.

"That’s your review file."

"That’s my everything file." She kept it extended. "Every hearing I sat, every classification they tried, every procedure they used to turn a person into a holding designation. Annotated. I’ve had years in facility waiting rooms and nothing to do in them but take notes on the machine while it processed me."

"Why me?"

"Because tomorrow you walk into that machine, and everyone else walking in with you will be watching the Vasquez show." Celia pushed the folder into his hands. "You’ll be watching the machine. You’re the only one I’ve met here who watches the machine."

He opened it.

The first page was a procedural map of a classification hearing, hand-drawn, every stage of it, and in the margins, in small even writing, the places where the machine could be made to jam.

"They classify us by what we hold," Celia said. "Not what we are. You told me once you understood that. Tomorrow, hold this."

She left him at the end of the corridor without a goodbye, and he watched her go and did not file her under closed.

◆◆◆◆

That night the pack read the folder in shifts.

Dani cross-indexed the procedural map against the inquiry’s published format and found them matched to the stage.

Joan read the annotations twice and went quiet in the specific way she went quiet when a document was better than anything her old office had produced. Selah read the margins.

"She jammed her own machine four times," Selah said. "It says so right here. Four separate hearings, deadlocked, and they had to re-convene every one."

"And they still classified her in the end," Soren said.

"They classified her in the end." Selah closed the folder with more care than a folder needed. "She’s not giving you a way to win. She’s giving you four extra rounds."

"Four rounds is a fight. She got a verdict. There’s a difference."

Maren, upside down on the bed with her tail hanging off it, ears tracking the conversation, said what the room was circling.

"So tomorrow. The son blames us, the father performs, the room hangs a Vasquez, everyone claps." She rolled over onto her stomach and propped her chin on both fists. "Where do we come in?"

"We come in," Soren said, "when the son finishes his provocation theory and the room needs somebody to check his numbers."

Dani looked up from the terminal for the first time in an hour.

"His numbers are real," she said. "That’s the ugly part. Every reading he’ll cite exists. I’ve verified half of them off Voss’s keys."

"I know. That’s why we don’t argue the numbers." Soren tapped the handheld. "We argue the invoice."

He set Voss’s handheld on the desk next to Dani’s map and Celia’s folder, three careers’ worth of paper, the monitor’s, the analyst’s, the bearer’s, all pointed at one afternoon.

"He’s going to stand up tomorrow and tell three continents that my pack woke the grave," Soren said. "And then I’m going to show the room who’s been paying the gravekeeper."

Grimm, under the bed, thumped her tail once against the floor.

Outside the window, across the dark campus, the lights in the hearing wing were already on, a full day early, cleaners and clerks setting a stage.

Soren watched the lights and added one line to the count.

They’d built him a room again.

They kept forgetting whose talent that served.