Page 46 of Mayhem

“I’m following the dress code,” I said as I slid into the booth beside Priya and tucked the heels underneath the table. “Nobody said the shoes had to remain physically attached to me. If Hunter has a problem with that, he can give me my fucking boots back.”

Devon leaned sideways to inspect the bandages, while Maren started explaining that walking barefoot through a campus full of rich people was probably how diseases evolved. Priya laughed with them, but hers came a second late and disappeared too quickly. She had both hands wrapped around a coffee she hadn’t touched, and every time the café door opened, her attention moved there before she dragged it back to whatever Devon was saying. I let the conversation continue while I watched her do it three more times. By the fourth, I stopped pretending I hadn’t noticed.

“Whatever you’re waiting to walk through that door is ruining your ability to lie convincingly,” I told her. “You’ve checked it every time somebody comes in, and that coffee has been sitting there long enough to develop a personality. If you don’t want to tell me, fine, but stop looking like you’re about to crawl under the table every time someone moves.”

Priya’s mouth tightened. She looked at Devon and Maren first, which told me immediately that whatever this was, they didn’t know either, then pushed the cup away with a sigh. “I did something stupid at the beginning of the semester. It wasn’t even a big thing then. There was a donor reception I wanted into because one of the alumni there handles placements for a firm I wanted, and Lacey Durant got me access through somebody else’s credential. When security noticed the extra hit afterward, she cleaned up the log before it became a disciplinary issue. I told her I owed her, and for a while that meant harmless shit—an introduction here, getting her a seat somewhere there, helping her get information she could’ve found herself if she wasn’t lazy. Then you showed up.”

That got my attention faster than the rest. Priya rubbed one thumb over the side of her cup before continuing, irritation pushing through the embarrassment now that she had finally started talking. Lacey had asked whether Hunter was using me for Quorum work, whether Nichlas was still protected, how often I was in the Kings’ lounge, what Malakai and I were doing, and what Ronan had said after yesterday’s assignment. Priya had refused because she didn’t know half of it and had no intention of reporting on me even if she did. Lacey’s response had been to remind her that she still had copies of the original access logs and could make the whole thing look much uglier if admissions ever decided to ask why Priya’s credential had been somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be.

I sat back and looked at her for a few seconds while the shape of it settled. “You agreed to repay a favor. You didn’t agree to become her informant, and you definitely didn’t agree that she gets to keep increasing the price every time she thinks she has something better to squeeze out of you. That stopped being collection the minute she threatened to manufacture a disciplinary problem if you didn’t give her information you never promised.”

“I know that,” Priya said, quieter now. “The problem is knowing it doesn’t make the logs disappear. I can tell her to fuck off and she can still send them wherever she wants.”

Before I could answer, Malakai appeared at the end of the booth carrying a drink I was fairly sure he hadn’t paid for. He didn’t ask whether there was room. He dragged a chair over from the next table, turned it backward, and folded his arms over the back while he listened to the last part of Priya’s explanation with far too much interest. I stared at him until he looked at me, completely unbothered by the fact that he had once again materialized wherever I happened to be.

“You’ve developed a tracking problem,” I told him. “I’m going to start charging you.”

“You can send me an invoice.” His attention moved to Priya after that, and for once he didn’t immediately turn the whole thing into a performance. “Lacey’s father handles donor compliance for a couple of families close to the Quorum. She’s been trading on that since freshman year because people assume she has more reach than she does. She knows enough to make trouble, but she also knows exactly how fast her own access disappears if the wrong people decide she’s unreliable.”

That was useful, which irritated me on principle. I looked back at Priya and held out my hand for her phone. She hesitated, then unlocked the thread and passed it over. I read through the messages once without commenting, then again more slowly. Lacey’s first requests looked ordinary enough. The pressure changed over time, each favor getting slightly larger, the language sharper whenever Priya resisted. The last few messages had stopped pretending altogether.

“You’re not the first person she’s done this to,” I said, handing the phone back. “People who build leverage this way don’t invent the system for one target. She helped you break a rule, kept proof that she helped you, then used the proof to rewrite what you owed. If that worked once, she did it again.”

Maren immediately mentioned two students she knew who had gotten into donor events through Lacey. Devon remembered somebody from the previous year who’d had an access problem vanish after she got involved. Malakai added a name I didn’t recognize, then sat back while the four of us started pulling threads. Priya tried twice to tell me I didn’t need to turn this into a project. I ignored the first attempt and answered the second only after we already had enough to prove the pattern.

“I’m not doing this because I think you’re incapable of handling yourself,” I told her, keeping my voice low enough that the surrounding tables couldn’t hear. “If you want me out of it, say so and I’ll stay out. But if you want her off your back, I can make that happen without turning it into some fucking blood feud. I just need to know which answer you actually want.”

Priya studied me for a moment, the embarrassment finally giving way to something firmer. “I want her to stop. I don’t want to spend the rest of the semester wondering when she’s going to decide I owe her something else.”

That was enough.

It took us less than half an hour to find Lacey outside the donor relations building. She was alone, scrolling through her phone beneath the covered walkway, and her expression changed when she saw Priya coming toward her with me on one side and Malakai trailing several steps behind. She recovered fast, but not before I saw the calculation. Good. People made mistakes when they had to recalculate.

I didn’t give her a chance to control the conversation. I stopped a few feet away and told her exactly what we had found: multiple students who had accepted small access favors from her, multiple situations where she kept evidence of the violation, and a pattern of increasing what she demanded once the original favor had already been repaid in pieces. I didn’t threaten to hit her or drag Hunter into it. I explained the part that actually mattered—that a favor network only worked if people believed the terms meant something. If Lacey became known as someone who changed the price after the agreement, everything she had built around donor access became worthless because nobody with functioning survival instincts would owe her anything again.

Lacey listened with her arms folded, then tried to frame Priya as someone backing out of a debt because she had suddenly acquired better friends. She insisted that covering the access log had been a risk and that asking for information in return was hardly unreasonable. I let her finish because the more she talked, the clearer the problem became. She wasn’t denying the threat. She simply thought the original favor gave her permanent discretion over what repayment looked like.

“That would be fine if Priya agreed to it,” I said. “She didn’t. You gave her access, she agreed to repay you, and you collected on that more than once. Now you’re threatening to alter evidence if she won’t feed you information about me and the Kings. That isn’t a favor anymore. That’s blackmail, and you’re doing it badly enough that I found four other people tied to the same pattern before my feet stopped bleeding.”

Her gaze dropped despite herself, catching on the bandages before returning to my face. Malakai made some pleased sound behind me that I refused to acknowledge. Lacey’s attention shifted to him anyway, probably hoping his presence meant there was a higher authority involved. He offered her nothing, which left the conversation exactly where it belonged.

Priya stepped forward before I could close it. Her voice was steadier than it had been in the café when she told Lacey to send her the original access record, including the timestamps and the credential chain, and then delete the copy she had been holding over her. If the issue ever resurfaced, Priya wanted proof of what actually happened rather than relying on Lacey’s version of it. She also made it clear that whatever remained of the original favor was finished the second Lacey tried to use it to get information about me.

I looked at Priya and had to bite back a smile. There she fucking was.

Lacey agreed because she understood the alternative now. We stayed while the file transferred and until Priya had confirmation that the copy was deleted from the account Lacey had been using. I doubted she was stupid enough to keep only one backup, but that didn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that she now knew using another would expose everything else she’d built.

When we walked away, Priya’s shoulders finally dropped. She carried her phone loosely at her side instead of checking it every few seconds, and by the time we reached the main path, she was complaining about my bare feet again like the last hour had never happened. Malakai fell into step on my other side without invitation, because apparently that part of my life was permanent now, and I let him stay there while Priya started describing exactly how much she hated admitting I had been useful.

I didn’t need the thank-you. The fact that she was laughing again was enough.

By the time we made it back to the Kings’ lounge, my feet hurt less and my patience had recovered enough that Hunter probably had a chance of surviving the next five minutes. Malakai reached the door before me, because apparently walking beside someone was too ordinary when he could turn every hallway into a competition, and I followed him inside with my heels dangling from one hand. The lounge looked almost exactly as we had left it that morning.

Hunter was still at his desk when I crossed to my corner chair, dropped my bag against the wall, and set the shoes on the floor before sitting down barefoot. I crossed straight to it, dropped my bag against the wall, and set the shoes on the floor like evidence in a criminal trial before sitting down barefoot.

Hunter noticed within seconds. His attention moved from the papers in front of him to Malakai, then to me, and finally settled on my bandaged heels. The tightening of his mouth told me the conversation was coming before he said anything, so I saved him the effort of building toward it. “The shoes are right there. I wore them through two classes and most of the morning, they took skin off both feet, and I’m done putting them back on until the wounds close. You’re welcome to be offended by that from across the room.”

Malakai dropped onto the arm of my chair as though we had assigned seats now, but Hunter ignored him. “You walked across Aldrich barefoot.”