A Superpowered Warrior in the Body of a Fake Heiress novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Scanner

The guild scanner melts under Kerensa's hand and Rafe offers a deal, then tells her the Haglund daughter was promised to him.

The car stopped under a glass tower with a sword carved into the lintel.

Nyberg Guild, said the brass letters on the door.

The man in the gray coat held it open for her himself.

"Rafe Nyberg," he said.

"Kerensa," she said, and did not bother with the surname.

He nodded once.

She had noticed one thing in the car and filed it away.

He had stood by the door while a man twice her size swung at her face, and he had not moved.

She did not forget that kind of thing.

The lobby was white stone, with a security gate across it and a black glass plate on a stand.

A guard in a Nyberg jacket stood beside the plate, bored.

"Everyone who walks in gets read," Rafe said. "Put your hand on it."

"Why?"

"Because the registry's file on you says F. Your father showed it to me twice."

Kerensa looked at the plate.

"And you don't believe it."

"I believe a man went through his own sideboard."

She put her right hand flat on the glass.

The plate lit white, then gold.

Then it lit a color that had no name, and a thin crack ran across the top.

The guard stopped being bored.

"Sir," he said.

"I see it."

The plate glowed so brightly that Kerensa squinted, and then it popped.

A puff of smoke rose from the stand.

The crack ran down to the base, and the glass fell off in two neat halves.

The lobby went quiet.

A woman at the front desk lowered her phone very slowly.

"That plate reads up to S," the guard said. "It's rated for S."

"I know what it's rated for," Rafe said.

Kerensa took her hand off the stand and looked at her palm.

The black stitches had not even pulled.

"Is that going on my tab?" she asked.

Rafe almost smiled.

He did not quite manage it.

"Upstairs," he said.

His office was on the fortieth floor, with a long window over the river and nothing on the desk but one closed folder.

He did not sit.

He stood with his back to the glass and his hands in his coat pockets.

"Here is what I know," he said. "Two days ago you were in a hospital with a fractured skull and a stitched hand. Last night, the doctor told your mother you'd barely speak. Today you broke a sideboard and a scanner."

"Yes."

"Where does a girl who grew up in a farmhouse learn to catch a swing like that?"

"In a different place," Kerensa said.

He waited.

She said nothing more.

He took one hand out of his pocket and set a pen on the folder.

"Good," he said. "Then I won't ask."

"You won't?"

"That's the first thing I'm offering."

He slid the folder across the desk.

"The Nyberg Guild files you with the registry as a Class Pending, under our protection. You get a room on the twelfth floor and a seat in our training yard. You don't answer to the Haglunds."

"And?"

"You hunt for us when we call. You pick which gates you take. No one writes your name on a lease without your hand on it."

"What's the catch?"

"No touching. No feelings." He said it flatly. "I won't make you a weapon and I won't make you a wife."

Kerensa raised an eyebrow.

"You've got an odd idea of what I'd be asking."

"I'm saying what I won't ask."

She opened the folder and read the first page.

The terms were short and plain, and he had signed the bottom already.

She took the pen off the folder.

"Twenty-four hours," she said. "I want to go back for my things, and you will stand there while I do it."

"The Haglunds won't like it."

"I don't need them to like it."

She signed.

When she handed the pen back, her left hand was in the light and his eyes went to the stitches again.

They stayed a moment too long.

"Keep it dry," he said.

"Why were you at my father's house today?"

The question had been waiting since the car.

Rafe looked out at the river.

"To end an engagement."

"Whose?"

"Mine."

"You're engaged to Lorna."

"I was supposed to be. For nine years I let people tell me that." He turned back. "Lorna Haglund has been introduced to me as the Haglund daughter since she was a teenager. I'd stopped asking. Then the registry sent me a notice two months ago that the real daughter had been found."

"You came to break it off with Lorna."

"I came to tell your father I wouldn't marry a woman who had been put in front of me as someone she isn't."

"He didn't know you were coming."

"He knew."

Kerensa waited.

Rafe did not look away from her.

"The contract my father signed with your father was never for Lorna," he said. "It says the Haglund daughter, by blood."

He let the sentence stand on the desk between them.

"That's you."

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