Page 7 of Dawn Caravan
Ben shook his head. “Money?”
“Power,” Tai said. “And favors. Both of which you are a source of now.”
“Shit,” he muttered. “Just how many letters am I looking at here?”
* * *
“Two hundred and thirty-seven?”Ben tried not to yell into the phone. “Chloe, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Excuse me?” Her tone said she wasn’t having even a little bit of it. “If you recall, I tried talking to you about your mail on aweeklybasis. I said something every time I talked to you, and you kept brushing me off. Fabi’s been sending things from Rome. Caspar’s new guy… uh, Zan?”
“Zain.”
“Yeah. He’s been sending stuff too. You’ve been getting mail here, in LA, and in Rome. And it all comes to me, okay? I’ve been paying all your bills and dealing with your shit here, but it’s not my job to answer things addressed to you. Did you even notice the piles were organized in chronological order?”
“I did notice that,” he muttered. “Thank you. Didshetake care of any of them?” He stopped short of asking if Tenzin was in New York. He didn’t want to know.
Probably. Maybe. Maybe he wanted to know just so he could avoid her.
“Tenzin took care of anything addressed to the two of you or to the business.” Chloe huffed out a breath. “But she’s not going to touch your personal mail, Ben.”
“Oh,nowshe respects boundaries?”
“I am not getting into this with you! Do not put me in the middle of your relationship issues.”
“We don’t have relationship issues because we don’t have a relationship.”
“I don’t want to hear it.” Chloe let out a long breath. “Seriously, every time I talked to you. Everysingletime I told you—”
“Yes, I know. You told me I had mail.” Ben looked at the boxes of correspondence that had been delivered to the communications room in Penglai. “I just had no idea how much.”
“One thing I noticed was that there were multiple letters from the same people. So it’s possible that when you sort things out, it’ll just be a lot of the same people writing you about one thing. It’s not necessarily two hundred thirty-seven different things on your to-do list.”
He murmured, “It’s a good thing I’m in Penglai.”
“Why? Because you have servants you can order around?”
“Yes.” Zhang had many servants, and while Ben was usually reticent to ask for their help, this time he wasn’t going to be shy. “My skin is delicate now, Chloe. I might get a paper cut.”
She snorted. “Right. One suggestion?”
“Fire away. I promise I won’t ignore you ever again.”
“Promises, promises.” He heard her shuffling papers. “There are probably tons of random requests. Tenzin explained that some of this is the vampire version of you winning the lottery. Every vampire you’ve ever met who thinks you like them—”
“Sadly, there’s probably a lot of those.”
“You weren’t exactly known for being a standoffish human. Most of them are probably going to be ‘Hey, my brother needs a kidney’ kinds of things.”
“Who needs a kidney?”
“No one probably. I just don’t know what lottery winners hear. I’m guessing. Sort through the randoms, but the one you really, really need to deal with is Radu.”
“Radu?”
“He sent a letter by private courier about six months after you went to Mongolia.”
That stupid icon. Ben had forgotten all about it. “Don’t you think she could deal with it?”
