Chapter 13: Conflict of Interest

The Infernal legal primer has been sitting on my nightstand for four days now, and I have stopped pretending I am not becoming obsessed with it.

It reads like advanced contract law written in a cipher designed by someone who wanted to discourage casual reading. The margins are dense with annotations. The structural principles—once you start to see them—are actually consistent. It is just that the underlying logic was built by beings who have had fifteen thousand years to refine exactly how you write an agreement that binds a soul. There is a certain grudging respect in that.

Catalina's copy is handwritten throughout, decades of notes in different inks, different decades. This makes it more useful than it should be. She has marked the sections that matter. She has flagged the traps.

I have been mapping it the way I map every contract: breaking it into component parts, understanding where the leverage points are, locating the clauses within clauses that give one party or the other an advantage that looks small until you have already signed.

The difference is this contract is mine.

I have been spending my days somewhere else. Coffee shops, mostly. The office later than necessary. One afternoon I found myself in the university library's rare books room just to have a reason not to be in an apartment that is 900 square feet and contains one demon who has decided that existing quietly in the same space as me is something he is good at. Which is the problem, obviously. He is very good at it. He does not talk much. He does not crowd. He simply exists in the room next to the room I am in, reading something in another language, amber light catching the sharp line of his jaw, and somehow this is worse than if he had tried something.

This is what I have been managing. This is what "conflict of interest" means in professional terms, and I have been managing conflicts of interest for eight years. The strategy is always the same: you acknowledge the problem exists, you document that you have acknowledged it, and then you create as much professional distance as possible between yourself and the thing that is the problem. You don't let it affect your judgment. You certainly don't let it affect your behavior.

You schedule yourself out of the apartment more.

Thursday evening, I came home earlier than intended because opposing counsel was not available for a call, and the apartment seemed to fold around me in a way I had not expected. Quiet. The lamp in the living room was on. Kael was in the chair by the window, backlit in that amber glow, and he was reading.

He was reading the primer.

My primer. The one I had left on the kitchen table that morning because I had been studying it over coffee before I decided I needed to leave. I did not remember bringing it to him. I did not remember giving him permission. But there he was, my own handwriting visible in the margins of the pages he was turning, and then I realized those were not my notes. The handwriting was too precise, too architectural. The notes were in the margins next to my notes, marginal annotations to my annotations, building on the logic I had laid out, pointing me toward the connections I had not yet made.

He was annotating for me.

He did this without asking. He did this without being thanked. He had apparently read through every section I had marked and decided that what I needed was a road map, laid out in his own careful script, guiding me through the logic of an Infernal contract the way you might guide someone through a labyrinth if you had walked it a hundred times.

I stood in the doorway too long. Longer than I should have. And he turned his head, unhurried, as if he had known I was there. Which he probably had.

Our eyes met. He did not look away. Neither did I, and then I did, and I went to my room.

---

The next morning I lost the thread of a client call for the first time in nearly a decade.

It was not even a complicated call. Merchant dispute, three parties, a shipping clause that was being interpreted differently by two of them. I know this work. I am good at this work. I was walking through the contractual language with Patricia Chen from Chen & Associates and I was supposed to be proposing settlement language and instead I found myself staring at my computer screen with absolutely no memory of what she had just asked me.

"Mara?" Patricia's voice came through the speaker, amused. "Are you there?"

"Sorry," I said, and I never say sorry. "Bad night of sleep."

This was only partially a lie. I had slept. I had just not slept very well, because the only thing in my head at two in the morning had been the thought of Kael making notes in the margins of a book I did not know he wanted to read, for reasons I did not want to examine.

I regrouped. I handled the rest of the call professionally. I even generated three new settlement proposals before lunch. But I knew what had happened, and I knew what it meant, and I filed it under things I was not going to think about.

---

He was at the kitchen table when I got home.

Not reading this time. Just sitting, waiting, as if he had known I would come home around six and had chosen to be exactly where I would need to be to either acknowledge him or construct an elaborate workaround to avoid the kitchen entirely. The apartment is not large enough for elaborate workarounds.

I made dinner—blackened mahi with lime crema, rice, plantains. It is the kind of thing my abuela taught me to make on weekends, the kind of thing that involves actual work and precision and the kind of focus that means you cannot think about other things while you are doing it. Kael watched me cook in that patient way of his. He did not offer to help. He just observed, the way you might observe a legal proceeding you found interesting.

We ate across the table from each other.

"The structure of the fourth primary clause," I said, because I was not going to say anything else, "seems to rely on a temporal binding that is not clearly defined in the glossary. How does that work?"

"The temporal binding is intentional," Kael said. "It allows the terms to adjust based on specific astronomical alignments. A contract meant to last through multiple human generations would require that flexibility."

I had not thought of it that way. I looked at the notes he had written in the margins of my notes—I had brought the primer to the table, was working through it over dinner like a normal person—and I understood exactly what he had been pointing at. I saw it now. How the temporal clauses cascaded into the binding mechanics. How nothing was left to chance because leaving things to chance was not how you built a contract that held a soul.

"That is elegant," I said.

"Catalina thought so as well."

There was a pause, small and unremarkable, and then Kael looked up from his plate and looked directly at me. His expression shifted. That thing. The thing I had been cataloging and refusing to name. It was in the amber of his eyes, in the small softening of his mouth, in the way he was looking at me across this table like I was something he wanted very badly and had decided not to take.

And he did not look away. He did not hide it. He let me see it.

He let me see him seeing it.

The silence stretched between us. Not awkward. Deliberate. The kind of silence that happens when two people understand exactly what is being communicated and neither one is in a hurry to break it.

I set down my fork.

"Do I need to add 'don't look at me like that' to the apartment rules?" I asked.

His expression did not change, but something in his body did, a small reordering of himself. "Likely not," he said. "I have been trying not to."

I picked up my fork again.

Neither of us moved.