Page 43 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

He pauses. "Pardon?"

"That case." I nod at the cart. "Paired index. Same year, same seal. You took the massacre and left its companion record." I tilt my head. "Almost like you only want the parts that make people scared."

"Read it for me, then," Lucien says, smiling, daring me. He thinks I'm bluffing.

I'm not. Because now I'm looking — really looking — and I see what my father did. The struck names aren't random. The scrapes leave a rhythm, every third stroke missing, the way my father left a deliberate error in the crosswords he made me so I'd know which clue mattered. Mirrored marks in the margins. A filing number that's wrong by exactly one digit. Find the lie in the details, he used to say. The truth hides in what doesn't fit.

He hid a counter-index inside the curated wound. Every atrocity Lucien wants has a paired case that corrects it, contradicts it, gives it context — and my father marked the path between them so only I would walk it.

"Well?" Lucien says.

"Give me a second." I press my bloodied thumb to the first hidden paired mark, then set the relic against the groove beneath Lucien's chosen stack — not east this time, but down into the matching files he left buried..

I drag my thumb through the frost on the first massacre file, then touch the relic to the paired mark hidden in the margin. Once. Twice. Three times. The sequence catches. Down the line of staged cases, a second light kindles — counter-records rising beside the originals, blue against blue, every curated horror suddenly sitting next to the context Lucien stripped away.

The obsidian throws its light high enough to crawl up the far wall — bright enough, I pray, to read from the other side of the stone, where I can hear something distant breaking. A door. A fight. Him. The bond gives me one thin thread of him, fear and fury braided together, close. See it, I think, with everything I have. Read the symbols.

"There," I point, breathless, helpful, the picture of a frightened girl finally cooperating. "Your transmission stack. It's ready."

He surveys the staged cases, the rig, the waiting channels, and for the first time something like joy moves across that cold face. "You see now," he says. "You understand."

"Yeah," I say. "I think I finally do."

He believes he's a breath away from owning the whole story, but he doesn't see that every case he's about to broadcast now carries its own contradiction stitched inside.

He's already made the mistake. He just isn't aware yet. Now I need Nico to read the light before Lucien hits send.

30

NICO

The sealed route was built to stop us, not to let us pass. It narrows only allowing one person at a time, and Lucien's first guard meets me there with a wooden stake raised like he means to stop us for another thousand years. He doesn't even get a swing in. I take the stake from him, turn it around, and shove it through his heart. He turns to ash as Gabriel passes me.

"Two more. And the far shelves are waking. Someone's pulling them open from the inside."

Someone. I feel her then—a thin, bright wire of Riley strung somewhere ahead, her heart beating far too fast. Alive. Hurt. Defiant. It makes me colder inside.

We hit the second pair together. Gabriel takes the left; I take the right and put him down before he finishes shouting the warning. The seams of the wall light as we pass, the vault tasting the speed of us.

The corridor opens. The main chamber is a cathedral of black shelving, and it is on fire with cold light. Lucien stands at the center on a raised stone dais beside the transmission stack—a tower of cabled relics and humming glass—his followers fanned around him in nervous rows. And across the room, half-shadowed behind a toppled case, I find her.

Riley. Blood on her temple, blood on her sleeve, one hand pressed flat against the relic where it sits socketed into the dais' lower housing. She is not waiting to be rescued. She's doing something—drawer after drawer slides open in long, lit rows down the chamber's wall.

"Don't look at her," I tell myself, and look anyway, once, then make myself stop.

"Cass," I say. "Talk."

Cassandra steps to my shoulder, eyes flicking across the waking shelves. "The cases he's chosen for the broadcast—" She points. "The bloody ones. The massacres. Each one's pairing has just opened beside it. Treaty seals. Correction files. Counter-markers." Her breath catches—not fear, recognition. "Thomas Harrow's hand. He cross-indexed every one of these. Lucien pulled the wound and buried the stitching."

"Then prove it loud enough for his people to hear."

Lucien's voice rolls around the chamber before she can. "The Black Fang enters. How fitting—the leadership's loyal blade, sent to keep history buried for another century." His ice-blue eyes find me without urgency. "They sent you to silence this bitch. Instead you fell in love with her, and now you bleed for the same cowards who hid the truth from us. Look at what they made you."

"I see what you curated," I answer, and I'm already moving along the shelf line, not toward him, toward her. "You chose the cruelty and left the rest in the dark."

"I chose clarity." His charm thins, the fury showing underneath like rock under tide. "History belongs to whoever lives to speak it."

A follower reading an open drawer hesitates before his weapon dips. "First Voice," he says, "why is there a companion file? You said these stood alone."