Page 149 of Legacy Elite

"No," I say.

"Lucian—"

"No."

"It isn't spying," my father says. "Nobody's asking you to—"

"It is spying." I look at Isolde. "You want me to tell you things she says to me privately. What else would you call it?"

"That's a hard way to put it."

"She talks to me because she's decided she can. That isn't intelligence. It isn't Draeven's and I'm not bringing it home."

"And if what she tells you affects this House?"

"Then I'll tell her it affects this House, and I'll tell her before I do anything about it. If there's a real conflict I'll declare it out loud, in front of both of you, in a chamber if I have to." I sit forward. "What I won't do is sit in her rooms making notes."

Isolde looks at me for a long moment.

"You've thought about this."

"Since April."

"And it took you until tonight to say it."

"It took until somebody asked."

They let it sit.

I look at the window, and at my father's coat over the back of the chair, and I let myself think about what this house actually is to me, which I've been avoiding all evening.

Because it isn't an institution. That's the part nobody outside it understands. When other people say House Draeven they mean the seat and the votes and the money. When I say it I mean my father at a desk at five in the morning because he genuinely believes he's responsible for people he will never meet. I mean being taken into rooms at nine and told to listen. I mean the way my aunt tips her head.

I mean being handed, very early, a set of things I was expected to be, and discovering somewhere around seventeen that I actually wanted to be them.

I'm not giving any of that up.

And then I think about Jessica, which is a different exercise entirely.

Not the direwolf. I think about a girl on her first day, saying good morning and then ignoring me. Moving the roast potatoes around her plate every night since September while Renzo eats them.

Standing in my sitting room telling me to stop managing her, and being right, and my having nothing to say.

And on Friday, when I told her she should leave and meant every word of it, and she looked at me and said it stopped being small yesterday, and I understood she was going to do the thing that frightened me for reasons I couldn't argue with.

It would be easy to say this is the bond, and it wouldn't be an unreasonable thing to say.

The bond is real. I'm not going to pretend it hasn't changed me.

But it didn't make her funny. It didn't make her right about me in October. It didn't stop me arguing with her in front of the Chancellor on Friday, and it didn't make me like her any less afterwards.

Whatever fate did at the start of this, I'm still here because I want to be.

"You're a Draeven prince," my father says.

I come back into the room.

"I know exactly what I am."