Page 26 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

"Why?" I need to hear it. Not the bond's reason. Hers.

She drags a hand through her hair. "Because I unlocked it. Because every time you put me somewhere safe, Lucien gets one more room to move in. And because—" she grimaces, "—if he wins, ordinary people die not knowing why. My people. The ones who still think monsters are bedtime threats. I'm not brave, Nico. I'm done letting powerful men draw maps with me folded off the edge."

It is not a speech. It is too stubborn and too tired to be one. That's how I know it's true. I make myself say it. "Fine. But you follow my lead."

Something crosses her face—surprise, maybe, that I yielded. She covers it fast.

"No," I say, before she can sharpen herself around the word. "That came out wrong."

Her brows lift. "Did the great Black Fang just correct himself?"

"Don't make me regret it." I pick up the relic and hold it out to her. "We move together. I handle what tries to kill us. You handle what this thing wants."

She takes it, and the map wakes under her palm, a thin line burning west across the dark. Not Europe this time. Farther. Across water. Not tonight, then. Not even cleanly tomorrow. Across water means papers, routes, bribes, and travel that leaves a person feeling smuggled even when they walk through the front door.

"Together," she says.

It should terrify me how easily I believe her.

"Together," I answer.

17

RILEY

After 2 days of traveling, we are welcomed by fog over Boston Harbor that doesn't drift. It settles on the harbor and stays, swallowing the masts of the few boats still moored this late. I taste diesel and something rotten underneath—the breath of a port that stopped pretending to be charming a long time ago.

"Remind me why the vault crowd loved coastlines so much," I murmur, working the basement lock of an old customs house with two picks and no patience.

"Water moves things without leaving tires," Nico says. "Cargo, records, people. Boston was one of the old Atlantic doors. Nobody questioned a manifest if the right seal sat at the bottom."

The lock gives, and I ease the door open. A damp chill rolls out that is older than the freeze outside, dry and papery, it's not been warm since the city forgot it was here. Metal cabinets line the walls in rows, green paint flaking, drawer labels typed on cards that are now yellow.

"Modern cameras," I say, nodding at the blinking eye in the corner. "Charming. They renovated everything except the part that matters."

"Stay to the wall." He says it like an offer, not an order. I notice the difference. I've been noticing a lot of differences since we fucked, the things we said and didn't say, and since I stopped being able to look at his fingers without remembering them.

Focus, Riley.

Nico moves along the cabinets, stopping at a drawer with a brittle paper label tucked behind cracked glass. "Here." He points to a customs stamp faded almost blank. A crescent cut through an anchor. "Night passage mark. Vampire couriers used it when cargo crossed human ports under archive protection."

"Cargo like relics?"

"Relics. Records. People who could not survive questions."

I let him have the hidden-world nonsense. That's his language. Mine is the lie underneath it.

I crouch and analyze the drawers like I would before stealing something—not reading, just feeling for the thing that's wrong. Everything is filed by crossing route. Lisbon. Boston. Halifax. New York. And then, between two Atlantic entries, a Boston card stamped outbound when it should be inbound. One direction flipped. Somebody filed it wrong on purpose and trusted nobody would know the route.

"This one," I say. "Wrong direction, wrong drawer. That's not a clerical error. That's a hiding place dressed as paperwork."

It's the kind of trick I grew up around. The kind my father would leave in maps and margins, it meant look closer. My stomach turns over before I understand why. I open the drawer. The relic, riding in my jacket, does it's thing again.

"Nico."

He's beside me at a speed I'll never get used to. Frost is spidering across the brass nameplate of the cabinet, and the typed ink on the cards is bleeding, letters swimming and re-forming. Beneath the visible text, other writing surfaces—rust-brown, hand-inked, hidden under the official record like a second skin.

"It's never reacted this hard," he says quietly.