Friday showed up the way every Friday at Halloran showed up: Steele’s conditioning at six, a three-mile run where Camille finished first and Rina finished last but finished, a shower that did not successfully remove the week’s accumulated bad decisions, and a text from Diane at nine forty-seven that said: Landed. Garage B. Wear the collar.
I wore it.
The coordination meeting with Class 1-A had been pushed to four because someone from the Lang Agency needed the conference room at two. Petra was involved. The scheduling collision was either genuine or deliberate. Halloran’s administration had run international Hero logistics for sixty-one years without a documented mistake, so I was betting on the second.
The afternoon had problems. Those could wait behind the existing queue: Dravid’s file on me, Steele’s file on me, Percy’s insurance document I still hadn’t read, the fact that I’d told Cole Dravid my Aspect wasn’t an Aspect without technically lying.
The morning was simpler.
Simpler didn’t mean safer.
Diane Fitzgerald walked through Halloran’s south entrance at eleven fifty-eight, two minutes early, because Diane arrived early to everything except her own birthday and then blamed traffic for both.
I saw her from the second-floor corridor.
Charcoal blazer cut tight enough that the fit was the statement. Heels putting her past six feet. Her hair down, that genetic-accident pink falling past her shoulders in waves that caught the California sun and made it look warmer than it was. Leather portfolio in one hand, phone in the other, crossing the quad like someone who’d decided where the path was before Halloran poured it.
Her eyes stayed the same cold blue they’d been across the quad nine weeks ago. They tracked the space with lazy precision, cataloguing angles and hierarchies and which students were pretending not to stare and which ones had already given up on pretending. She moved through Halloran’s campus the way she moved through every room she’d ever entered. Not arrogant. Just correct. Diane Fitzgerald did not adjust her route to accommodate architecture. She entered a space and the space did the adjusting because the alternative had never produced useful results.
The portfolio was new. The phone wasn’t. She checked it once while walking, thumb moving without looking, then slid it into her blazer pocket without breaking stride. Someone somewhere was getting an email they weren’t ready for. That was Friday for someone. For me it was a different problem entirely.
She looked up mid-stride, found me in the second-floor window, and smiled. Not the client smile. Not the boardroom smile. The one that meant she’d already mapped the afternoon and I was two steps behind her timeline.
I had three minutes before she reached the south entrance. Three minutes to remember I was Lukas Belmont, Hero student, professionally composed, not someone whose chest had done something structurally inadvisable the moment her hair caught the light.
The Oracle Feed could have helped. It was maintaining pointed silence instead.
I’d watched her walk into boardrooms, press conferences, contract negotiations with Heroes whose egos needed their own postal codes. She walked the same way every time. The quad at Halloran was no different. The students pretending not to stare were learning something they hadn’t been ready for. The woman who built the machinery that turned Heroes into celebrities operated at a frequency the machinery couldn’t contain.
Three weeks since I’d seen her in person. Three weeks since the Fitzgerald estate kitchen that morning, maple syrup cooling on plates neither of us finished, the California king where she’d mapped what I could become with the clinical attention of a CEO evaluating her best acquisition. Three weeks of texts. Calls at hours she considered checking in and I considered evidence. The specific kind of missing that Diane would call operational absence instead of anything softer because she didn’t deal in softer, she dealt in leverage and I was learning the difference cost more than I’d budgeted for.
She was more beautiful than physics allowed. Fifty-whatever-she-refused-to-confirm, the Timeless trait keeping her aging at a fraction of normal speed. Pink hair catching afternoon light. Blue eyes that read balance sheets and people with the same terrifying accuracy. This particular problem wasn’t resolving on a timeline I could project, and the Timeless trait meant it would persist considerably longer than I wanted to calculate.
I took the stairs two at a time.
"Sugar."
The drawl. Charleston vowels stretched by twenty years of California sun and professional leverage. One word and the entire campus recalibrated.
"Diane."
She stopped and assessed me the way she assessed everything: completely, under two seconds, conclusions forming before the data finished arriving. Her blue eyes tracked from the collar I’d buttoned as instructed down the fitted shirt, across shoulders that Demigod had widened by another fraction since she’d last measured them with her hands, back up to my face. One point four seconds.
"You’ve gotten bigger." Not a question.
"I work out."
"Mmhm." She closed the distance. Her heels clicked against the quad’s polished stone in that rhythm I’d heard echo through the Fitzgerald estate for nine years, always approaching, always carrying intent.
She stopped close enough that her perfume arrived first. Expensive and botanical, something I’d caught at two in the morning outside her bedroom door, at eight when she passed me heading to client meetings, in the kitchen when she leaned past me for the top shelf. The scent registered before the words.
"You’ve also been making my phone ring." Her tone stayed warm. The warmth had edges. "Agency inquiries at hours I consider rude. A nationally broadcast interview conducted without consulting me first. And according to Sloane’s extremely detailed texts—" She paused. Let it work. "—you kissed at least one classmate during one exercise. Cameras already recording. Standard protocol, I’m sure."
"One. During training. Protocol."
"Lukas Belmont, I did not drive forty-seven minutes in Friday traffic to discuss protocol." She reached up and adjusted my collar with two fingers. The gesture read maternal and not maternal simultaneously. Her fingertips brushed my throat. Stayed half a second past necessary.
"I drove forty-seven minutes because my boy has apparently decided to become famous, controversial, and institutionally complicated in the three weeks since I last saw him, and I need to assess the damage in person before I start fixing it."