Page 86 of Legacy Ascended

“You can cook?”

“That's rude. Can you?”

“Yes.”

“Of course you can.”

“Thursday?”

“Sounds great.”

Then he reaches down for his bag.

“There's one thing from my family's records I'd like you to have before the archive session—”

“Tomorrow.”

His hand stops on the strap.

Then he lets go of it and sits back up. He puts his arm around me, and I lean into his side.

“Tomorrow,” he says.

A minute passes.

Then another.

Soren doesn't reach for the bag again.

Chapter fifteen

Soren

I send the notification to the House office at 4:45.

It is four lines long. It states that I hold a copy of a House record concerning the Luftemilen judgment, that I intend to provide it to Miss Jessica Miller, that I am acting personally and not for House Soren, and that I am notifying the office in advance.

Then I go and correct forty minutes of Torres's footwork in the arena, because I said I would.

The office will have read it by five. My father will have been told by six.

He knocks at twenty past nine.

"Evren."

"Come in."

He fills the doorway completely, melt still dark on the shoulders of his coat. He doesn't take the coat off.

He looks at the room. Two chairs. The desk. The boxes from his own house stacked against the wall where I put them, still in the order somebody packed them in.

"You asked for those to be sent."

"I did."

"Nobody told me."

"I didn't ask you. I asked the house."