Page 38 of Nobody Told Me Thrift Shops Sell Stolen Dragon Heirlooms

I nodded solemnly.

She folded her arms. “And one of the smartest.”

My surprise must’ve shown, because her lips curved upward.

“Don’t get used to hearing that from me,” she said. “Or from Payton. He’s furious because you seized an opportunity before anyone senior did, and now he has to pretend this is about decorum.”

I stared at her.

Moira’s tone remained dry, but there was something warmer underneath it now, something that felt almost like welcome.

“You saw the room,” she said. “You saw the pressure point. You understood the client’s emotional logic, the firm’s wariness, and your own leverage… In under ten seconds. Then you moved.” She tipped her head. “That’s lawyering. Messy, ill-advised, hierarchy-destroying lawyering, but lawyering all the same.”

A laugh escaped me before I could help it. “I genuinely thought you were going to kill me.”

“Please. That would be far too much paperwork.”

That made me laugh so hard, I had to clap my hand to my mouth to contain it.

Moira waited until I came back down from it, then said more quietly, “You’ve got a real mind for this, Quinn. Not just the knowledge or the formatting. The instinct. The appetite. Don’t let anybody turn that into something smaller because it inconveniences them.”

The words hit harder than I was prepared for.

I’d spent so much of the internship trying to be useful in ways that wouldn’t get me noticed for the wrong reasons. I had trained myself to be fast, pleasant, flexible, impossible to resent. I knew how to make myself indispensable. It was much harder, and much rarer, for someone to look straight at me and tell me they saw all that.

So, naturally, I made a joke.

“Well,” I said, blinking once and aiming for light, “I’m absolutely putting ‘hierarchy-destroying lawyering’ on my résumé.”

Moira snorted. “Don’t. HR has no imagination.” She glanced back at Payton’s office and lowered her voice. “For what it’s worth, Wallace looked like she wanted to be mad but couldn’t quite muster the energy.”

I looked over my shoulder before remembering Helena Wallace was on the other side of a closed door. “Really?”

Moira sighed. “Don’t start preening. It’s unattractive.”

“Too late. Internally, I’m unbearable.”

“That, I already knew. Now, that’s all the compliments you’re getting from me,” Moira said. “I still despise interns on principle.” She shifted the legal pad to her other arm. “Go back to work. Virelli’s team will be finalized this afternoon. And, Quinn?”

“Yeah?”

Her expression sharpened just a little, back into that smart, tired, lethal competence that had first made me want her approval in the first place. “Next time you decide to bargain with a supernatural apex predator in the hallway, give me thirty seconds’ warning.”

I smiled. “I’ll try.”

“No, you won’t.”

“No,” I admitted. “Probably not.”

She shook her head, but she was smiling now, however faintly, and then she turned away toward the elevators.

7

RAFE

DO TRY NOT TO BAPTIZE THE PARTNERSHIP

I took the necklace home in the ivory case Quinn Bradley had carried it in. She’d had the case in her bag, and explained it was where she’d found it. My father found me outside my mother’s parlor with the case still closed in my hand.