Page 10 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

"It means I move faster."

"It means it stopped being a recovery the second it lit up. It's a race now, and you're a length behind a woman who's never even heard of us." He lets it sit. "Don't underestimate her."

"I'm not romanticizing a thief for getting lucky twice."

I can hear the grin bloom. "Twice. You're keeping count. Listen to yourself—you sound impressed."

"I sound thorough." It leaves my mouth a half-second too fast, and we both hear it.

"Graves," I say. "Where does he sit in this?"

"Nowhere good. Your broker lost the wheel a day ago—his handoff in Prague burned, somebody reached the buyer ahead of him, and now Graves is calling dead numbers and swearing on his mother he never knew what the stone really was." Gabriel's ease thins. "For once I believe him. He didn't steer this. He just opened the door and can't get it shut."

So the one set of hands I understood has been pried off the work, and above his greed sits something patient—ideological enough to brand its soldiers with a broken circle, rich enough to bury its money three accounts deep. I know the shape of it. I have known that shape a long while. I do not yet have a name I can say aloud without burning the little proof I hold.

A second line lights. Cassandra, who has never once wasted a greeting on me. "Two archives felt it," she says. "An old monitoring stone near Trieste and the Vienna house both registered the wake inside the same hour. It is active, Nico, and it is loud. Anyone with the means to listen now knows roughly where it has been."

"Then they know roughly where it's going."

"They will. See that the means do not belong only to them." She is gone before there's time to respond.

I crouch at the open shaft. The rope is fouled dark where she caught the lip of it going down and paid a stripe of skin for the speed. Blood. Hers. I do not touch it; I do not need to. The scent reaches me anyway, and it is too bright, too immediate, threaded through with the chill of the relic she carried against her body. It hooks somewhere behind my eyes and pulls toward a place the mission never sent it.

The relic. It's only the relic, bleeding its waking into everything she touched. That is the single sense in which this woman is difficult to put down.

I make myself work the rest. A corner of forged transit paper, torn—Austrian rail, the regional lines. A third-class ticket stub gone gray with platform grease, the kind a person buys with cash when they want no name on any manifest. A damp boot-print under the rear window, still drying, pointed east. Every thief keeps a second nest, and hers, sits outside Vienna, where the rail runs and the city's noise finally quiets. Austria, then.

I go down the stairs, past the men I broke, and out into a city with no idea what walked through it tonight. The unnatural chill of the stone is a thin line now, running east, and it leads me toward the car.

She is hurt, alone, carrying a stone that screams to every listener in Europe, and she does not know how many will hunt her for it.

I have been wrong about very few things in my lifetime. I drive toward Vienna certain this will not be one of them.

7

RILEY

Three exits. Front door, swollen in its frame, bolt thrown. Window over the sink, painted shut a decade ago, but glass breaks. The service stair at the back, narrow enough that a big man would have to turn his shoulders to take it. I've spent forty minutes learning the place by feel, just in case I have to leave in a hurry.

My palm's stopped bleeding. I work the dried rust out of the lines with a wet rag, slow and careful, watching the water swirl pink down the drain. The cut is shallow. I don't remember earning it. Somewhere between Prague and Vienna, my body started keeping secrets from me.

The obsidian is in a case beside a lamp. The relic's chill runs through me in a slow throb, weird and unnatural. I keep blaming the fact it's an obsidian stone. The half-drawn map glows faint inside the lid—thin silver lines, a route that quits before it commits to anything, like it's enjoying this.

"Overpriced rock," I mutter. "Eccentric billionaires. Victimless."

I swear I'm going crazy, because it's not like the rock will laugh. I'm reaching to shut the case when I notice it. Not a sound—the lack of one. A floorboard out in the hall that should groan under the settling of an old building, gone quiet, like something's standing on it to keep it still. Outside, a car that's idled too long finally cuts its engine, and the silence after is wrong. Too whole. The kind of silence that's waiting on something.

My heartbeat climbs. I don't let my hands know about it. I pocket the case, kill the lamp, and put my back to the wall by the service stair.

The door doesn't burst inward. That's the first thing that frightens me. It opens like it was always going to. A man comes through it like he owns it—unhurried, certain, not a single wasted motion. Tall. A black coat that swallows what's left of the light. The men in Prague crowded the air with shouting and bad cologne. This one fills it just by standing in it.

"Riley Harrow."

I hate how he says my name. Like he's read me front to back and found the ending dull.

"Wrong guesthouse," I pipe up. "The brooding-predator package is two doors down."

"You took something that isn't yours." His voice is flat, nearly bored. "You don't have the faintest idea what it is."