Page 44 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

"Stay in formation," Lucien snaps.

But it's already spreading. Cassandra's voice cuts above the grinding stone, naming it. "Mismatched seal on case nine. Missing companion on case twelve—deliberately pulled. Altered indexing, every one signed off by a single hand." A pause. "His."

Two more falter. One doesn't—he lunges for the open drawers with a torch flaring, ready to burn rather than let either side hold the truth, and Gabriel is on him before the flame touches paper, dragging him down, shouting at the room, "Nobody burns the evidence! You torch it, you lose your own argument, you absolute genius—" His grin is there, but it's stretched thin over blood and exhaustion. He shoves another panicked follower back from the shelves. "Easy. Easy. Read it first, kill each other later."

The factions are fracturing—exactly the mess truth makes. Some of Lucien's people press forward harder. A rival contingent uses the confusion to grab for the stack itself. The vault groans, defenses waking to all of it, frost crawling the floor. Then the transmission stack stutters.

I feel Riley do it before I see it—a sharp spike of pain through the bond, her palm grinding harder against the relic. The tower's glass flickers. Lucien's curated broadcast, half-uploaded, glitches and begins pulling the paired records into its own feed, the corrections cabling themselves into his bloody reveal. His own machine starts contradicting him.

"Stop her," Lucien breathes—and lunges.

He comes off the dais at me like something poured out of the old world, and the impact takes us both into a wall of shelving that explodes into splinters and stone. He is older than me. I feel it in his strength, in the patient cruelty of how he fights—claws raking, fangs bared, every blow aimed to break and to last. We go through a second case. Iron screams. I taste my own blood. But I don't fight him to win the room. I fight him to keep him off her.

"You can't hold it," he hisses against my ear, claws in my shoulder. "She corrupted the feed. The reveal's gone—so let them have chaos. Chaos still serves me."

"No. It serves her."

Riley rips her hand from the stone and slams the dais' housing shut. The stack convulses—and instead of going dark, it floods. Every open drawer, every paired seal, every counter-marker scrolls through the glass at once, redirected inward, projected onto the chamber's high black walls for every faction to read. Lucien's chosen story doesn't go out to the world. It collapses here, in front of the only people who can dismantle him.

His followers see it. His face, for one instant, finally cracks all the way through. I use that, and drive him down into the broken stone, pin iron across him.

"You can no longer harm us or them." I declare.

I punch my first through his rip cage, and extract his heart. The First Voice goes still beneath me, and ignites into fire before ash is left in a pile where he once was.

The vault's pale light dims to something almost like quiet. The chamber is ruined. Smoke, broken cases, allies and enemies frozen mid-reckoning. Gabriel is bleeding and upright. Cassandra is already moving toward the exposed records, hands shaking.

I cross the wreckage and reach Riley as she sags. I catch her bloodied, half-conscious, grinning like she just robbed the world.

"Told you," she rasps. "Found the seam."

"You did." I hold her up. Around us, the archive waits, vast and unread, every wall still lit with everything we haven't understood yet.

"It's not over," she says.

"No," I agree. "But his version is."

31

RILEY

The silence is worse than the fighting. I'm on my knees in the cold, one hand clamped over the gash on my forearm, ears straining for the next thing that wants me dead. Nothing comes. The vault only settles—ash sifting through the blue-white glow, broken shelving ticking as it cools, a drawer somewhere sliding open on its own with like a breath let loose.

Lucien is gone. I keep waiting to feel triumphant about it. Instead there's the floor against my shins and the throb of every place I've been hit.

"Riley." Nico reaches me before I've finished turning my head. He doesn't haul me up or fuss. He crouches so I can lean, and tilts the cut at my temple toward the light. His eyes have gone luminous, the predator in him riding near the surface. "You're bleeding in multiple places."

"Yep." My voice is gravel.

Around us, the survivors don't know what to do with their hands. A dozen of Lucien's people stand in the wreckage, blinking at each other like sleepers shaken awake. Gabriel works the room, low and easy, that relaxed grin of his doing the job of a drawn weapon—keeping the place from deciding to bleed again. "Easy, friends," he says. "Nobody swings, nobody loses an arm. We're all just here to read."

Cassandra is already at the archive wall, palms hovering over a row of obsidian cases without touching. "He didn't finish," she says, and her dry voice has lost its edge. "Riley. He never got to burn what he came here for."

I get up, and Nico's hand finds the small of my back—steadying, not steering—and I let it stay.

"He pulled the slaughter and torched the context." Lucien curated horror: the purges, the feedings, every century my new friends earned the word monster. He meant to hand humanity a highlight reel of its worst nightmares. "We killed the broadcast. So what's he so afraid we'll find?"

"The other half of the filing. These cases open in pairs. Every atrocity he chose has a twin he didn't. I can feel the locks, but the index is blood-coded, and the key, well that's you."