Page 18 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

"It's a scratch." I don't pull away. Instead, I feel how cold his thumb is against the cut. Up close his gaze is enigmatic, the silver gone luminous. "Why'd you grab me like the boat was already gone?"

He doesn't answer at first. Then: "Because for a moment I thought it was."

"That's not strategy."

"No." He stops there. He's good at stopping there.

I let the quiet sit, because pushing won't move him and I know what it's like to be backed against your own walls. "I've spent my whole life being the one nobody could pin down. Now there's a price on my head and a man who watches me like I'll vanish if he blinks. I don't get to be free. I get to be valuable. I hate it. I hate that the difference is starting to matter."

His hand is still at my face. Neither of us moves. The boathouse creaks, water slapping the hull below, and the space between us goes thin and warm and dangerous. Then he steps back.

"The disc," he says.

I pull it out. The new symbol is gone, but the map fragment holds — clear, real, the next point on a trail somebody built a long time ago to lead someone exactly here.

"It answered me," I say quietly. "Not the map. Me." I make him meet my eyes. "You felt it too."

His phone vibrates before he can answer. Nico looks at the screen, and whatever he sees shuts his face down.

"Stay here," he says.

"Love being managed."

He steps outside anyway, voice dropping too low for me to catch. I hear only one word through the warped wood.

"Cassandra."

I note he doesn't deny it answered to my skin. That's the part that scares me — that for the first time, Nico doesn't have an answer ready, and he won't tell me why.

12

NICO

We come up out of the Venetian dark past midnight, and the door is where Cassandra promised — iron, taller than I am, and I'm 6'4".

Riley stops four paces back. She's been counting things since the lagoon — exits, locks, the bruise going purple along her jaw she won't let me near.

"That's a big ass door," she says, "for a library."

"It's not a library. And we are not meant to be here."

The iron swings before I touch it, and Gabriel fills the gap, all easy shoulders and that grin he wears like armor. Gabriel has already lied, bribed, smiled, and probably threatened his way through three layers of archive protocol.

"It's a tomb that takes notes," he says. "Nico. You look terrible. You must be the famous thief."

"Famous to who?" Riley doesn't offer her hand.

"Everyone who's been bleeding to find you. Gabriel Rousseau." He looks her over slowly — the boots, the bruise, the way she's already clocked the two sentries standing behind him. I watch him watch her do it, and something in me pulls tight and ugly. I shove it down where it belongs.

She doesn't smile. She steps past him like a turnstile she doesn't trust, and I watch him mark that — the not-smiling, the not-flinching — and bury it where I can't reach.

The archive goes down, not along. Cold lamps in iron cages throw light that doesn't flicker; the walls are honeycombed with locked cabinets, wax seals gone amber over keyholes. Vellum, dust, the dry breath of records no human was meant to stand this close to. Riley's pulse ticks up. I hear it rising. So does everyone here, and that's the problem.

Cassandra is at the long table, gloves on, the disc fragment laid on black cloth. She doesn't look up right away. When she does, it's at Riley, and it isn't friendly.

"So you're the reason it's awake."

"It was a paperweight when I lifted it." Riley's voice is sandpaper-tired. "Take it up with whoever built it."