Page 25 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

"I always twitch." She sits up, pulling the blanket with her, and I miss the warmth immediately, which is my own problem. She notices the glow from the relic. "It did it again?"

"Yep."

"Cozy." She rubs her arms. "So we're not staying."

A call shivers against the floorboards—the cheap one Bastian was given a number for, in another life, when this was a job and not whatever it has become. I answer on the second ring.

"You're alive." Bastian's voice is pitched high, frayed at the edges. Wherever he's calling from, he's whispering. "You've still got it."

"Why do you care, Graves."

"Because I'm a dead man, that's why." A wet swallow. "The Prague job. The buyer. It was never a buyer. The client routing went through a cutout, and I just found out it goes straight into Lucien's people. I set you up, Serrano. I'm⁠—"

"You never know. That's how you sleep at night."

"They used my network like a faucet." His breath rattles. "Casimir's ledgers got cracked when you put him on his back. Everything he bought, everyone he sold to, it's all in the open now, and Lucien's been buying. He's got a piece. One of the fragments. Came through the same rot I came through. I'm telling you because if I'm going down, I want one person to know it wasn't on purpose."

Riley is watching my face, reading it the way she reads a lock.

"Stay off the grid. If you can."

"There's no grid left for me." The line dies.

I lower the phone, and it lights again. Cassandra. Text, not voice—she only writes when it's bad.

Confirmed. Lucien holds one fragment. He's presenting it to the conclave as proof the vault should be opened. Turning it political. He's gaining names. It's now a campaign.

A third message stacks under it before I've finished the second. Gabriel.

I know what you're already thinking. Don't. You cannot fix this by putting her in a box. She's not cargo. Don't lose her like an asset.

He always did know me too well.

"Okay." Riley has her boots half-laced. "Your face just did six terrible things. Talk."

"Lucien has one of the fragments."

She goes very still. "How."

"Casimir's records. The broker chain that sent you into Prague. The same hands that touched the obsidian touched everything else. We just couldn't see it." I stand. "Which means he can move openly now, and you can't."

"Excuse me."

"There's a place in the Dolomites. Old. I leave you there, I run the rest of this down, and you don't end up on a list of deaths by Lucien." It comes out clean and reasonable, but absolutely the wrong thing to say.

She rises slowly. "Say that again. The part where you turn me into luggage."

"To keep you breathing."

"No." Just the one word, sharp enough to cut glass. "Don't you call a cage protection again."

The words land somewhere I can't armor. Years of solving danger by moving fragile things away.

"You'd be safe," I say.

"I'd be blind. And waiting. And I've done waiting."

She laughs without humor. "I'm in this with you."