Page 19 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

"I intend to." Cassandra's amber eyes move over her — not the bruise, not the boots, something else she doesn't name and won't, and I know her too well not to see her decide against it. "Sit. Don't touch anything. The cabinets bite."

"So does the company." Riley sits.

A keeper peels out of the shadow by the stacks — Verret, black wool and a chain of keys heavy as a censer.

"You brought a human into the stacks." He says human the same way someone would say infestation.

"I brought an asset."

"You brought a mouth that breathes on five centuries of —"

"She breathes on whatever I tell her to." I mean every degree of it. Verret looks from me to Riley and recalculates.

Riley can't leave it. "I'm right here. And I've been in better-defended coat closets. Your seals are dry-rotted, your second sentry's favoring his left knee, and that lock on the far cabinet's been opened more recently than the rest. The wax doesn't match."

Quiet — the kind that means she's right. Verret's mouth thins.

Gabriel laughs once. "I like her."

"You like everything," I say.

Cassandra doesn't laugh. She's already at the far cabinet, two fingers over the seal Riley named. "She's right. Opened within the month." Her gaze cuts to Verret, lingers, falls.

She turns the fragment under the light. "Lucien isn't simply chasing this — any fool with money is. He's using the chase. The reward is bait: he's set the old families against each other, lets them think they race for treasure while he counts who answers his call and who stays silent." Her mouth goes grim. "He isn't building a hunt. He's building a congregation — money first, then belief."

"And once enough believe," I say, "he doesn't need the vault to win. He needs it to crown himself."

Cassandra bends over the fragment with a loupe — a house mark she half-knows, a route that breaks off into nothing. "It points onward. The next piece left for private keeping. But the destination's been scraped. Deliberately." She sits back. "Someone didn't want this read."

Riley reaches across — slow, hands visible — and tilts the fragment toward the lamp. "That's not script. That stamp in the corner — that's a provenance mark."

"A what?" Gabriel says.

"A maker's stamp. The serious private collections brand their holdings, prove a piece passed through their hands." Her tired eyes go sharp. "I've seen this one. Invitation-only, behind a museum front in Paris so it can move things across borders as loans. Your ancient vampires used a shipping label."

Cassandra's looking at her now with something that isn't warmth but sits right next to respect, and I don't like the heat it puts under my skin — the want to put my shoulder between that look and her.

Verret moves before I do. "The human has handled a sealed artifact and named a route to outside parties. Contamination of the record. Lockdown." His hand finds a cord on the wall. The iron groans, the amber seals begin to glow, and the sentries stir.

I'm in front of Riley without deciding to be. For one moment she lets me. Then she steps clear of my shadow, chin up.

"I had it," she says, not looking at me. Looking anywhere but at me.

"You want tampering? Look at your own hands." She's pointing. "That cabinet — fresh scratches inside the keyhole, not out. A thief picks from outside. A keeper opens from in. You opened it, with those." She nods at the keys. "And there's a page gone from the ledger under your arm, torn edge still bright. Vellum that old yellows in a day. You cut it tonight."

Verret's composure cracks — a hairline. Enough. Gabriel's hand closes on his wrist before the cord finishes its pull, and the seals sink back to amber.

"He's pulling the same record we are," I say. "For Lucien."

Cassandra takes the page from his coat herself, two fingers, like handling something diseased. She reads, and her face tells me before her voice does. "Paris. The girl's right — the house behind the museum." She folds it away. "He'd have had it across a border by dawn."

They take Verret away. At the door Gabriel isn't grinning.

"This place was supposed to be sealed," he says. "Sealed and ours. If Lucien's bought a keeper down here —"

"Then he's bought worse, higher up." Cold settles at the skin below my hairline. There's no floor under this anymore — the rooms I'd have sworn were safe have keepers counting money in the background.

Across the table Riley folds the loupe back into Cassandra's kit, and Cassandra lets her. Three vampires now know what she's worth — the relic wakes for her, she reads a room faster than anyone her senior, she pulled a traitor out of the stone by his own dust. Some are already doing the math, and the math says a human this useful is better off silenced before someone else owns her.