Page 34 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

"Then we chase⁠—"

"We move." I get an arm around her as though she's made of the one thing I'm most afraid to drop.

We come out into cold air and tree-dark as the chapel takes fire behind us, the stripped saints lit at last by something that isn't reverence. Gabriel folds us into the car. I don't remember the woods between. I remember her pulse under my hand and the effort it takes not to clutch it like a man holding a door shut against the sea.

In the back seat she finally turns to me. "You had him," she says quietly. "Clean line. I watched you not take it."

"I had you," I say.

Cassandra comes back once more, softer than I have ever heard her. "He's clear of the valley. Nico — he left with enough. He'll move on the next stage before you guys."

Riley's fingers turn under mine and hold on. She is bleeding and shaking and alive against me, and the night should feel like a win. It doesn't. Because Lucien walked out of that church having learned the one thing I would have died to keep from him — not where the trail leads next, but exactly where to set the knife.

23

RILEY

The lodge sits at the dead end of a logging road Gabriel swore wasn't on any map worth trusting. One room, mostly. An iron stove going cold in the corner, a sink that coughs rust before it runs clear, two windows with the glass gone milky at the edges. It smells of woodsmoke and damp wool and the antiseptic Nico's already pulled from a tin first-aid box that looks older than the road.

"Locks," I say.

"Front's a deadbolt. The back you can wedge. Sit down, Riley."

"Bossy." But my legs are doing a thing I don't authorize, a fine tremor that runs up into my hands, and I'm tired of arguing with my own body tonight. I drop onto the bench by the stove.

He's at my side without seeming to cross the distance. He crouches so we're level, and I watch him notice every cataloged injury the same as I noticed the exits — the split in my lip Lucien put there, the gash above my brow gone tacky, the bruised cuffs of skin where the iron held my wrists. His fingers hover near my pulse, and I give him the wrist on purpose so he doesn't have to take it.

"You're cold," he says.

"You're worse."

A breath that might be a laugh, if he let it finish. He cleans the brow cut first, slow, his thumb bracing my jaw so the antiseptic doesn't run into my eye. It stings. I don't flinch, because flinching feels like handing Lucien one more thing. His attention snags on my wrists when I try to fold them out of sight under my sleeves.

"Don't," he says.

"It's nothing."

"It's not." He turns my hand over, careful as a man defusing something, and presses two fingers flat to the inside of my wrist. Counting again. He keeps doing that — checking the beat under my skin like he needs proof the thing that almost stopped tonight is still running.

I let him have it for a few seconds. Then I pull the thread I've been holding since the chapel.

"He has a piece of the resonance now. He has names. He has whatever he stripped off that box. You could've ended it, and you didn't, because I was chained down."

"I know what it costs." He sets the cloth he's using to clean me down. When he looks at me, his look has gone bright at the edges, the thing under his skin surfacing. "I have closed many situations. Removing the variable. The clean line was always the answer." A muscle works in his throat. "You were the variable. I chose the variable."

"Don't say it like that. Like I'm a math problem you got wrong on purpose."

"You're not a problem." Rough now, the control fraying at the seams. "You were the only thing in that room I wasn't willing to lose. I would make the same choice with a gun to my own head. That terrifies me more than Lucien's ulterior motive."

I want to be only grateful, but I'm not built for only one feeling at a time. "And if he uses those seconds to win? If people die because you picked me?"

"Then they die and I picked you." He says it quietly, with none of the relief of a man absolving himself. "I won't pretend that's noble. It isn't. It's the most selfish thing I've done, but I'd do it again."

I keep myself unguarded, but look away at the unnervingly obsidian, silent.

"Here's my problem," I say, steadier. "The second somebody decides I matter, they start building me a cage. A nice one, sometimes. Padded. But the door still locks from outside. My father did it with secrets. Lucien wants me for what my hands can open. Your leadership would put me behind glass as a prop. And you — you've tried to do that a little more than once. Dolomites. A box in the mountains. Stay safe while the men handle it."

"I shouldn't have."