Page 4 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

The screen changes, and I lean in before I decide to. It's a still, lifted from a camera she clearly knew was there, because she's staring down the lens with the faint, crooked beginning of a grin — as if she'd already ruled the thing a witness and not a threat. Chestnut hair shoved up under a cap. A scatter of freckles. Hazel eyes doing math while her face does charm.

"Riley Harrow," Cassandra says. "Twenty-nine. Human. No supernatural ties we can find, which is its own kind of remarkable given who she steals from."

"A thief." I should feel nothing. A human criminal is a variable to be removed, not admired. "Record?"

"That's the strange part. She barely has one." A sparse file fills the screen — no convictions, three near-misses, a long shadow of jobs hung on her by reputation alone. "A vault in Geneva the maker swore couldn't be opened. A grid in Monaco with biometrics anyone would have struggled with. She walked through both as though the locks were a courtesy."

I read the file twice. I haven't read anything twice in centuries. But there's a grain to her work I recognize — patient, exact, allergic to the obvious. She doesn't smash. She listens to a system until it tells her how it wants to be opened.

"She's reckless," I say."She let the camera see her face. That's ego, not skill."

"Maybe." Her mouth does something dry and unconvinced. "Or she's never met a thing she couldn't outrun. Yet."

A liability. That's the word for her — a quick, fragile human about to stroll into a room full of monsters and pocket the one object that could unmake my whole world, who won't know what she holds until it's far too late to set it down.

I convince myself the small flicker of interest under my breastbone is professional. One craftsman noting another's tools. Nothing more. I close her file last, and I notice that I close it carefully.

"You're going yourself," Cassandra says. Not a question either. "You could send a team."

"A team is six chances at one mistake." I lift the long black coat from its hook, checking the weight of what hides in its lining out of habit older than most cities. "I go in quietly. Recover the Key before the gavel falls. If the thief takes it first, I find her, take it back, and close the breach."

"Close the breach." She repeats it slowly. "Soft word for a hard thing."

"It's the only word the job needs." I shrug into the coat. "She steals that. She doesn't get to keep a secret older than her bloodline. If she's good, she never sees me coming."

"And if she's neither good nor lucky?"

I don't answer. I've answered it a hundred times, in a hundred cities, and it has never once cost me a night's sleep. There's no reason to think a woman with a crooked grin and impossible hands will be any different.

"Watch the Moreau money," I call to her from the door. "If it moves, I want to know which way."

"Nico." One syllable, and it stops me, the way only she can manage. When I turn she's reading me with that archivist's care, like I'm a document she's trying to date. "You've recovered a thousand of these. Why does this one have my hands cold?"

"Superstition," I say. "You told me so yourself."

The car waits when I step into the dark. Prague is two hours by air and a lifetime of habit away. I've made this drive a thousand times, toward more relics than I can name, and every time I've come home with the thing I was sent for and left a city that never knew I passed through.

This will be no different. A thief is a thief. A relic is a relic. The pull I feel toward Prague is nothing but the old, clean hunger of a hunter who has caught a scent. I believe it completely.

3

RILEY

The invitation called it "a private evening of curated acquisitions," which is just an expensive way of saying that everyone in the room will lie to your face while complimenting your earrings.

I hand my cream cardstock to the man at the door and disappear into Vivian Cole. Art consultant. Mid-tier money. The kind of woman who belongs in a borrowed gown and doesn't blink at a six-figure opening bid. He scans the card, scans me, and waves me through into a baroque palace dripping with gold leaf and the kind of quiet that costs more than most people earn in a year.

The preview was a sleepy thing. A few attendants, a rope, cameras I could've counted on one hand while half-asleep. I'd walked it twice, memorized it, and decided it was soft.

Tonight this is a palace. Two men flank every archway now instead of one, and they're wrong for this place—broad in the shoulder, matching suits cut by the same contractor, earpieces tucked behind clean-shaven jaws. House staff don't move like that. House staff drift. These ones plant. I clock a camera dome bolted into the cornice above the stairs, fresh enough that the plaster around the mount hasn't been touched up. There's a wand scanner working quietly at the cloakroom, disguised as a coat check.

Somebody got nervous, and upgraded. Great, I think, accepting a flute of champagne I have no intention of drinking. Love it when the easy job files for a promotion.

"You're frowning, Vivian." Bastian's voice crackles into my ear, smooth as ever, the comm bud invisible under my hair. "Beautiful women don't frown at parties. You'll spook the marks."

"Your floor plan's a fairy tale," I murmur into my glass, lips barely moving. "They tripled the muscle. Where'd the extra security come from, Bastian?"

A pause. Just a hair too long. "Last-minute insurance. Big lots draw big interest."