365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 04

365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 04 – R. Vale Is a Man

The phone I bought in Ohio started buzzing at 8:41 a.m. on the day my family finally noticed.

I was two miles from the Vanguard gate.

Sixty-three missed calls in eleven minutes. MOM. DAD. ASHER, DECLAN. MOM. MOM. MOM. Three hundred- and seventy-two days of silence, and now my screen wouldn’t stop shaking in my hand.

I sat on my bike at the side of the road and watched it light up like a slot machine.

“You could answer,” Echo said. “You could hear what she has to say.”

“She had a year,” I said, and I turned it face-down in my jacket. “She can have a year back.”

Here’s the thing about the number sixty-three. It’s not love. It’s panic. Love shows up on day two. Panic shows up when someone realizes there’s going to be a headline.

I rode the last two miles and stopped in front of a wrought-iron gate with a silver crown worked into it.

The guard came out of the booth, took one look at me, and physically laughed.

“Deliveries at the south gate, sweetheart.”

I took off my helmet.

I’m five foot five with black hair to my waist and a face that gets me carded buying energy drinks. I’ve made

peace with it. Mostly.

I handed him the black envelope without a word.

He read it twice. He read it a third time. Then he keyed his radio and said, in a completely different voice, “Director Larsen. R. Vale is at the north gate. R. Vale is a woman.”

Behind me, three trucks of new recruits had gone dead silent.

“Enjoy this,” Echo purred. “You’re going to hear that sentence for the rest of your life.”

The Vanguard campus is a hundred and sixty acres of stone and glass owned by the Sterling family, who are, in every way that counts, kings. There are fifty of us in the intake year. By the end of the trial fortnight, there will be thirty-five, and the fifteen who fail are escorted off the property and blacklisted from every House on the continent. Forever. No second chances.

Director Larsen met me on the front steps with my file in his hand and a look on his face like a man who’s just been handed a live grenade with a bow on it.

“Miss Vale. You’ll be skipping the trial fortnight.”

Fifty heads turned.

“Sir?”

“Your assessment scores are the highest recorded in the Vanguard’s history. Not this year. Ever.” He said it loudly. On purpose, I think. “It would be a waste of everyone’s time to have you sit through it. You’ll spend two

weeks with Instructor Emmett instead.”

Forty-nine people looked at me like I’d killed something they loved.

Instructor Emmett is sixty, built like a wall, and never once in fourteen days told me I did well.

He tested my recall. He tested House law – three centuries of dynastic contracts, arbitration precedent, blood-debt statutes. He gave me impossible scenarios: two Houses, one dead heir, four hours to prevent a war,

On day nine he stopped mid-question, stared at me for a long moment, and said, “Who taught you this?”

“My father,” I said. “By accident.”

Because that’s the joke, isn’t it? Every hour I sat quiet in Marcus Vale’s office as a kid, filing his papers, fetching his coffee, listening to him negotiate with monsters – he thought he was babysitting me. He was training his own replacement.

The other recruits ate together, so I ate with them. It took me four days to want to drown all of them.

The worst was Nolan Shaw-second son of House Shaw, jaw like a shovel, opinions like a landfill. His shadow was Margo Kestrel, who told a room of fifty people that “the little one” only got a pass because

someone at the top wanted to sleep with her.

“May I bite her?” Echo asked.

“Behave.”

On the last morning of the fortnight they packed us into the auditorium.

Director Larsen walked onto the stage. And behind him, without ceremony, came a man in a charcoal suit

who owns half of everything, and the room made a sound like all the air had left it.

Augustus Sterling. The King.

“Today you learn whether you belong to the Vanguard,” Larsen said. “Fifteen of you go home within the hour. I’ll announce seven Team Captains. And then His Majesty will announce this year’s Unit Commander.”

Beside me, Nolan Shaw stretched out his legs and smirked at the ceiling.

Larsen read the Captains. “Flora. Beck. Waylen. Mara. Enzo. Orson.” A pause. “Vale.”

Then the cuts. Fourteen names. Faces going white one row at a time.

Nolan was still smirking when Larsen said the fifteenth name.

“Shaw.”

Margo’s name came right after his, and she screamed – an actual, unhinged shriek – and Nolan hauled her

out of the room with murder in his eyes and his hand over her mouth.

I should have watched him leave more carefully.

I didn’t, because the King had stepped to the front of the stage.

“Unit Commander outranks every Captain in this year’s intake,” he said. “It’s the highest post in the Vanguard that isn’t mine. I’ve watched all of you for fourteen days.”

His eyes found me in the back row and stopped.

“This year’s Unit Commander is Rowan Vale.”

And in the ringing, disbelieving silence, I heard a thought that did not belong to me, drifting from a man three rows over who was staring at the back of my head:

Vale? The Vales just reported their daughter missing this morning.