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Magdalene turned on her heel and marched towards the bathroom, all pretense of enjoying the drink abandoned. The second meow echoed through the short hallway right as she unbuttoned her dress. The garment hit the tile, and she stood in the doorway, undoing her garters when the third one permeated the air.

“This is ridiculous!”

Grabbing her robe from a hook—and how did George even know her habits in such detail?—Magdalene almost ran to the door for the second time this evening. She was not going to stand for this.

As she wrenched it open, she found the cat exactly where she’d left it. On its haunches, gazing up at her.

Damn.

She crouched, bringing them closer, and stared back at the rotund creature. Orange, massive, with a big round head and heavy paws. The cat was zen itself. Unperturbed, it returned her glare without wavering.

When she finally lost the staring match, she hung her head, but not before nodding towards the room.

“Don’t make yourself at home, though.”

She was Magdalene Nox, and she was having staring contests with feral creatures. Obviously, she must have lost her mind.

The cat gave her a curiously subdued look, then walked past her, unhurried. Once inside, as if it was the most polite of guests, it pawed at the little rug by the door before making a few circles and finally laying down in a perfect cat loaf. Within a few seconds, Magdalene heard soft snoring.

As she rose up, all she could think was that indeed, she had not stood for this. At all. In fact, the cat had totally played her like a toy store banjo while she had practically been kneeling in front of it, almost reverently, as if it were some kind of feline royalty. For some reason, as she picked up her whiskey and dropped the robe on her way to the shower, she did not feel defeated.

The snores grew louder and dammit if the studio didn’t feel cozier for it.

9

OF NECESSARY EVILS & FELINE PROGRESS

Men… Men were a necessary evil. Magdalene had learned her lesson well at Candace’s knee. And she tended to treat men as such. Sometimes necessary. Occasionally evil. Right now? They were the bane of her existence.

Alden was the distant evil. Timothy was the grudging necessity. And Joel? Joel was just a pain.

Since she’d begun at Dragons, the specter of Alden had cast its long shadow over everything she did. Fenway was close to him. Joel deferred to him. Sam seemed connected to him in some nebulous yet to be understood way. And he made a very good show of pretending to not remember Magdalene at all.

She didn’t believe him. Not for a second. Granted, thirty years was a very long time to hold on to a memory of a child whose life you’d almost ruined and whom you’d discarded like a bunch of old rags. But if she knew anything about people like Stanton Alden, it was that they didn’t reach, and more importantly retain, the heights they did by not doing their research and due diligence. Especially not if they were running for political office. Stanton Alden had to realize who Magdalene Nox was.

But he was silent on the matter. In fact, he was silent on all matters. In every single interaction they’d had, he said exactly nothing of substance that would tell her more about the initial position he’d taken regarding the school. To save it, or better yet, close it. No skin off his back.

Alden left the island the day she was introduced at the assembly—an assembly where he, again, sat somber and silent, his forearm supporting Orla and his eyes on the faculty.

As much as Magdalene loved a good mystery, he was too important a figure on the Board of Trustees to treat him as a mere curiosity. So she kept her counsel and her ear to the ground where he was concerned.

Still, if his immediate departure from Dragons and the fact that he entrusted the Transition Committee to Joel were any indication, his regard for his responsibilities as a trustee didn’t seem all that high. And she was all too cognizant that Joel was a pain. An absolutely patronizing prick whom she needed to manage at all times, because he believed he needed to ‘help’ her. His ideas were foolish at best and incompetent, or downright dangerous at worst. He fancied himself savvy and shrewd, except all he was, was a privileged man who’d never worked a day in his life and had zero credentials, bar his trust fund and his position in Bostonian society.

All things considered, Magdalene could relate. After all, this could have been her. Candace had set her up financially ages ago with the settlement from her third divorce. Or had it been her fourth?

“I don’t understand why you need a profession. Or why, if you do want one so badly, it has to be something as ghastly as education. Have you not had enough schools?”

Candace had grumbled and cajoled, but Magdalene went to Brown and Harvard to study pedagogy, anyway. And no, she didn’t do it for Dragons, or in some desperate plan to return one day in a blaze of glory.

No, Magdalene hadn’t had a plan, just a well-guarded and rarely nurtured hope. One that had finally come to fruition, three decades later, only to have ridiculous, unqualified men underfoot when she really would have preferred to be alone.

Like in the interview that she had held for one Samantha Anne Threadneedle.

“Please tell us the extent of your professional qualifications, Ms. Threadneedle.” Joel’s voice rose squeakily at the end of the question—specifically at the name—with a suggestiveness that abraded Magdalene’s nerve endings. He always sounded strange and mildly disturbing when he mentioned Sam’s name, but Magdalene couldn’t yet pinpoint why.

Sam took his sniveling and pomposity in stride and, as she answered the question in a calm and factual manner, Magdalene sensed a set of eyes on her, the feeling just as disturbing as it was familiar. Looking up, she ran straight into Timothy’s direct stare.

Yes, men were the bane of her existence, and this one was no exception. He’d volunteered himself to be a part of the Transition Committee—surprise, surprise—and had not left her side these past few days. They ate together, they strategized together, and they sat in these meetings together, and throughout all this, Magdalene was keenly aware he had absolutely no interest in anything that was going on around him—except her. Which would be intolerable in and of itself–