Page 3 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

"A door," I say. "To a place that's meant to stay shut."

"To the vault." She lowers her voice, even though these walls are soundproofed, electronically swept, and protected against every kind of listening. "And if a human gets that thing somewhere quiet and clever enough to crack it, they don't just get rich. They get the one secret we've spent thousands of years burying."

I won't ask her to say more than she has. We both know the edges of it; neither of us wants to handle the center.

"Who flagged it?"

"I did." She taps the screen and a list of names scrolls up — buyers, brokers, the carrion that gathers around anything rare. "And I flagged it the second one name showed up beside the sale."

She lets the name rest on the glass between us. Moreau.

"Lucien," I say.

"Not him directly. He's too careful for that. But the money moves through three shells and comes out smelling like his philosophy." She watches me. "You remember his philosophy."

"Secrecy is a cage, and a caged thing forgets it has teeth." I quote it flat, the way you'd recite a sermon you stopped believing before you were born. "He's been singing that hymn for six hundred years. Nobody dances to it."

"People are always one bad century from dancing to it." She doesn't smile. "I don't like his name near a relic that opens that particular door. Call it an archivist's superstition."

My phone rattles once. A single line, no signature, routed through four countries before it reaches anyone. Recover it. Quietly. Before it's read.

I turn the screen so she can see. She nods. "The Council woke up fast."

"The Council is afraid. Fear makes them quick. It rarely makes them smart." I pocket the phone and rise, already cataloguing what I'll carry. "I've recovered worse than a paperweight with delusions of grandeur. Four hundred years, and I've never lost one."

The phone goes off again — a call. I answer without looking, because only one man uses this line.

"Tell me you're already packed," Gabriel says, easy as someone who's never had a real worry in his hundred and eighty-nine years.

"Tell me you're useful."

"Always wounding. Yes, I'm in Prague, drinking something overpriced and watching pretty people pretend they aren't criminals." A pause, the soft clink of a glass. "This auction's a circus. You'll want backup that smiles better than you do."

"Low bar."

"You set it." He laughs, warm and unforced, the only one of us who laughs like he means it. "When do you land?"

"Soon. Hold the room. Watch the floor. Don't get clever."

"I'm always clever. It's my best feature." The line quiets a beat. Then, gentler: "Hey. This one feels loud. You sure it's a clean job?"

"They're all clean," I say, "when I run them."

I hang up before he can argue, because Gabriel is the one creature alive who'll keep arguing, and I have files to read.

Cassandra has already queued the preview footage. We sit shoulder to shoulder in the blue wash of the screen, two predators studying a field of smaller ones.

"Brokers first." She brings up a weathered man in a good suit, working the room all teeth and handshakes. "Bastian Graves. Human. Sells anything to anyone, then sells out everyone to save his own hide. He brokered the lot and doesn't know what he's holding. He never does."

"Useful. Frightened men talk."

"If you can catch him. He's slick as a wet knot." She swipes. "Collectors next. This one you'll mind."

The new face is older money, colder eyes — tall, dark blond, dressed like a portrait of himself.

"Casimir Armand." Everyone in recovery knows the name. "He doesn't want the Key for what it opens. He wants it because someone told him he can't have it."

"Years of wanting things, and he's never once heard no with any grace." She swipes again. "And then there's her."