Katarina woke up with two problems.
Problem one: Stellara Brevaine now controlled most of the independent trade infrastructure in the southeastern district. Warehouse leases, supplier contracts, distribution rights, carriage services. The woman had swept the auction like she was grocery shopping and the rest of the district was about to discover that the cost of doing business had just gone up.
Problem two: Vessa’s boobs kept getting bigger.
This was not a strategic concern. This was a biological reality that Katarina’s hormonal body had decided was extremely relevant to its interests, and no amount of corporate discipline could override the part of her brain that kept replaying the neckline of that blue dress.
She sat at her desk, pulled the Greypass route documents toward her, and started outlining a security assessment framework.
Twenty minutes later, she looked down at the page and found that she’d doodled the neckline of Vessa’s dress in the margin. Not the route, not terrain features, but a neckline with collarbones and the beginning of a curve that she’d been shading and everything.
She stared at it.
Then she pulled the page off the desk, walked to the candle on the shelf, and burned it.
[I am in a complicated economic situation and I am DOODLING. This is rock bottom. This is the absolute floor! Vivienne Ross once restructured an entire logistics division during a hostile takeover attempt and I am drawing CLEAVAGE on a route survey!!!!!]
She sat back down, took a breath, and forced her brain into the lane it was supposed to be in.
The Greypass trade corridor. Inactive three years. Previous license holders abandoned it because of monster-heavy terrain, bandit activity, and the complete absence of security infrastructure along the route. No patrols, no waypoints, no safe harbors. Just fifty miles of bad road through worse territory connecting Selvarra and Coppiano to the coast.
Nobody valued it because nobody could use it.
But that was the point. Stellara’s entire strategy was about controlling existing infrastructure. Safe routes, proven warehouses, established supply chains. She didn’t gamble on broken things. She bought working systems and integrated them into her network.
The Greypass wasn’t a working system. It was a ruin. And ruins were cheap precisely because fixing them required something that Stellara’s conservative, acquisition-based strategy couldn’t provide:
The willingness to take a risk on something that might not work.
[This isn’t a consolation prize. It’s a chokepoint.]
If the Greypass could be cleared and made operational, it was the only corridor into Selvarra and Coppiano that didn’t run through Stellara’s network. Every producer in those towns who wanted coastal access would have two options: pay whatever Stellara charged to move goods through her infrastructure, or use Katarina’s route.
The route didn’t need to be better than Stellara’s network. It just needed to exist. One alternative was enough to break a monopoly’s pricing power.
[I just need muscle.]
She looked at the terrain notes. Monster activity concentrated in the middle stretch where the canyon narrowed. Bandit presence, opportunistic, based around the abandoned waypoints. Nothing organized, nothing that suggested a permanent military force. Just enough danger to make the route unprofitable for anyone who couldn’t afford protection.
Katarina couldn’t afford protection. Not the professional kind, not the standing-security-force kind.
But she knew someone who used to do this for a living.
She found Brynn in the training yard, hitting things.
"Mother."
"Dumpling!" Brynn turned around with a grin and sweat running down her exceptionally toned arms. "You’re up early. Want to spar?"
Katarina put on her serious face and touched her fingertips together.
"I want to talk business."
Brynn’s grin didn’t falter, but her eyes sharpened. Katarina had learned to read Brynn’s grins the way other people read reports. This one said "I’m listening."
So, Katarina laid it out.
The route. The terrain. The monster activity and the bandits. The abandoned waypoints that could be restored as staging posts. The fifty miles of bad road that, if cleared and secured, would give the Montecardi house a trade corridor that no one else in the district could compete with.
"I need the route cleared," Katarina said. "Monsters pushed back, bandits driven out, waypoints established. Not permanently garrisoned. Just cleared well enough that a merchant caravan with basic security can make the trip without getting eaten."
Brynn’s yellow eyes were bright. Her whole body had shifted forward, weight on the balls of her feet.
"You want me to call Marga."
"I want you to call everyone."
The grin that split Brynn’s face was the biggest Katarina had ever seen. She looked like a military vet who’d just been told the war was back on.
"Give me an hour," Brynn said, and practically sprinted toward the communication stones.
Katarina watched her go. Brynn’s shoulders were back and her steps were longer and there was an energy to her that Katarina hadn’t seen before.
[She’s been wasted here. And I didn’t see it until now.]
Brynn paused at the door and looked back.
"You want to come watch? I’m going to wake up some people who owe me favors."
"Eh, why not?"
She didn’t make it to the communication stones.
"Katarina."
Seris was leaning against the doorframe of the main hall. She’d been there for a while, apparently. Long enough to have heard most of it.
She walked over and sat down on the bench next to Katarina, close enough that their shoulders almost touched.
The morning air was still cool and Seris was warm and she smelled like jasmine, which was the soap she used, and Katarina had known this for years and it had never once been relevant information until puberty had arrived and made everything relevant.
"Tell me what you’re planning," Seris said. Her voice was quieter than most people expected when she dropped the charm and the performance. Steadier.
Again, like with Brynn, unafraid of showing her power level, Katarina told her. The Greypass. The chokepoint strategy.
The fact that Stellara’s infrastructure sweep left exactly one gap in the district, and Katarina was sitting on it. How the route, if operational, would give every inland producer an alternative to Stellara’s network and break her pricing power before it fully set in.
Seris listened without interrupting. Her purple eyes stayed on Katarina’s face the entire time, and when Katarina finished, there was a silence that lasted long enough for Katarina to hear the birds outside and the distant sound of Brynn yelling at a communication stone.
Seris reached over and tucked a strand of black hair behind Katarina’s ear. Her fingers were warm and they lingered, tracing the line of Katarina’s jaw before pulling away, and Katarina’s brain short-circuited for about half a second.
"You’re terrifying sometimes, you know that?"
Katarina’s brows shot up.
She said it softly, the way you’d note that the ocean was deep or the sky was high. Her purple eyes were warm and steady. She kissed Katarina’s forehead and Katarina shrugged.
"I have to be, if we’re gonna make it to the top."
Seris smiled at that.
"Well, good luck, piccola."
Then she stood up and walked away, and good god, her hips were something else when they moved like that. All wide and slow and deliberate, and Katarina watched because her willpower had clocked out approximately ten seconds ago.
[... I am so weak to this woman.]
Her ears stayed red for the next hour.
[Anyway, bandits, monsters, muscle. Let’s get to it.]