Page 2 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

"You're not telling me everything."

"I'm telling you what you'll be paid to know." He spreads that oily smile again. "Which is the most anyone in my line of work ever gets."

Every instinct I have is standing up and pointing at the door. The money's too clean. The client's too hidden. The thing on that velvet looked back at me through a photograph.

"I'll think about it," I lie.

"There's a preview," Bastian says, like he didn't hear me. "Collectors only, by invitation. I took the liberty." He slides a second card across — an invitation, this time, real and crisp, made out to a Ms. Vivian Cole. "Go look at it. Then tell me no."

Ms. Vivian Cole wears a charcoal dress, low heels she can run in if she has to, and the bored expression of a woman who has seen better than this. I am Ms. Vivian Cole for exactly one evening, and she is very good at her job.

The preview's held in a private gallery off a cobbled square, all marble and hush. I'm through the door thirty seconds before the rest of me catches up, because my eyes are already working. Two exits I can see — the front, and a service door behind a velvet rope, half-hidden by a potted fig. Cameras in the corners, four of them, the dome kind, with a blind wedge to the left of the staircase where their fields don't overlap. Two guards on the floor pretending to be guests, earpieces betraying them, plus one I'd bet money on stationed up the stairs. Staff moving champagne in lazy circles, clockwise, every six minutes. I clock all of it the way other people clock the weather. My father taught me to read a room before I learned to read a clock. Find the way out first, he'd say, then you can relax enough to enjoy the party.

I never did learn the relaxing part. The relic sits alone in a case at the room's far end, lit from below so the shadows fall up and wrong. Up close it's worse and better both. The etched markings I saw in the photo aren't decoration — they're a pattern, repeating and shifting, the kind of puzzle my dad used to scratch onto napkins to keep me quiet in restaurants. Find the rule, Riley. Everything's got a rule if you stare long enough. My fingers twitch toward the glass before I catch them. The thing isn't beautiful, exactly. It's certain. Like it already knows how this ends and is just waiting for the rest of us to figure it out.

"Remarkable, isn't it." The voice comes from my left, refined, unhurried.

I turn. A man stands a polite distance off, studying the case — tall, elegant, dressed in a suit that costs more than my apartment building. Dark blond hair swept back, pale skin, the still composure of someone who's never once been in a hurry. He doesn't look at me. He looks at the relic like it owes him money.

"It's something," I agree, in Vivian's bored alto.

"It's the only thing in this room worth the trip." A faint smile. Then he mingles into the crowd, leaving cold air where he stood. A waiter murmurs Mr. Armand as he passes, and I've heard the name before, Casimir is the first name. I file it away in the back of my skull for safe keeping.

There are others watching it too. A woman by the stairs who hasn't touched her drink. A heavyset man near the front who keeps checking his watch and the case in the same glance. Nobody at this preview is here for the Etruscan pottery.

I stand in front of that black, knowing object, with three sets of expensive eyes pretending not to want it, a sealed title burning a hole in my memory, and a number that could give me back my life.

Outside, in the darkness of the square, I call Bastian.

"Well?" he says.

I think about the letter on my counter. The looping handwriting. The teeth in the shadows.

"I'm in," I tell him. "But I want half up front."

2

NICO

The dossier on my desk is three months old, and I've read it eleven times — ten more than it deserves. A blood-trafficking ring in Lisbon, already dismantled. Routine. I close the folder. Routine has become the only flavor my life still carries.

Then Cassandra walks in without knocking, and I know the routine is over. She never knocks; she's never once needed permission to bring me bad news. She crosses my study unhurried, a tablet held against her chest like a shield, her coiled black hair pinned up. Her amber eyes carrying the stillness she gets when she's already three moves ahead of whatever she's about to say.

"Tell me it's not the auction houses again," I say.

"It's worse." She sets the tablet down and turns it to face me. "The Obsidian Key hit our monitoring net four days ago. Prague. A private auction, invitation only — the kind that doesn't exist on paper."

I do not move. I've trained myself out of the small reactions, because in my work a tell can cost a throat. But something very old in me goes quiet and alert at once.

"That relic was sealed," I say. "Two hundred years ago. By our own people."

"And now it's a lot number with a reserve price." Her mouth thins. "Someone dug it up, Nico. Someone who either has no idea what it is, or knows exactly."

I pull the tablet closer. A grainy feed, a glass case under museum light. The relic rests on velvet, no larger than my fist, all hard angles and a darkness that eats the light instead of throwing it back. Even pixelated, it sets the back of my neck prickling.

"Threat assessment," I say.

"Contained, for now." She sits, crosses her legs with the precision of a woman who measures everything, including how much she'll let you see. "But you know what the Key is. You know how it opens."