Page 45 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

Low on the wall, a case shelved where it has no business being—a seventeenth-century seal sitting smug in the middle of the other hundreds, its carved date filed four centuries too early. Anyone else sees a slip of the chisel. I see a wink.

"That one," I breathe. "Cass, that one's a plant."

She frowns. "It's misfiled."

"My dad didn't misfile." I press my thumb to the carved date and drag it down, the way I used to trace the dumb cipher wheels he tucked into my birthday cards—the ones with a single letter always turned backward, so I'd know where to start. "He left himself a tell. One thing wrong on purpose, so the right person notices and everyone else walks past it."

The case warms under my hand, and a list of the saved appears. I read aloud. "Vienna. Plague ledger. Contained before it crossed the river. Recorded dead—thirty." My throat tries to close. "Projected without intervention—eleven thousand."

Cassandra makes a sound I've never heard from her. She reads faster than I can. "Prevention records. Interventions. Each one paired to a catastrophe that never reached daylight. A war turned aside in 1870. Something that should have come up out of the Carpathians, killed in the dark before any city ever saw it. Riley—he wasn't only hiding what they did wrong. He hid the proof that they also stood between the world and things it never learned to fear."

The whole shape of it drops into place and nearly takes my knees out. Lucien was never going to just skip the good parts. He intended to erase them. Salt the ground, torch the ledgers, make certain that when humanity finally looked at vampires it would only ever see teeth. A nation of monsters is easy to declare war on. You can't crown yourself the savior of a people unless you've first taught everyone to be afraid of them.

"He needed the world terrified," I say. "Not informed. Terrified. That's the entire con."

Nico has gone motionless beside me. When he speaks, it's pitched for me alone. "And your father knew."

"Yes." Anger comes up hot and useless—that my father carried this by himself, that he spun everything, the debt and the auction and every door that nudged me here. He used me. He also handed me the one thing he couldn't trust to anyone with fangs or a badge.

I don't get to make this clean. The atrocities on those twin shelves are real. People died screaming, and the record of them deserves to stand. But Lucien's version was machined to make peace impossible. My father didn't die for a flattering story. He died so the whole ugly, merciful, complicated thing would survive in one piece.

When I lift the misfiled case free, there's a card beneath it. Index stock, soft-cornered from handling, his blocky print I'd know in pitch dark.

KEEP IT WHOLE. NOT CLEAN. WHOLE.

You always could spot the turned letter, kiddo. —T

The factions have gone silent. One of Lucien's lieutenants has folded to the floor with her face in her hands. Another glares at the polar shimmer like it's accusing him personally. Some look ashamed. A few still look like they'd rather it had burned.

"Both worlds," Cassandra says, hollow. "If he'd won—if the only record left was the killing—humans and vampires march to war certain they're righteous. Over a story somebody designed."

Gabriel lets out a breath. "Nothing like learning the apocalypse had an editor."

No one laughs. But the room breathes. I stand in the wounded vault with my father's card in my fist and the rescued names glowing on the wall, and I finally understand what he was asking of me. Not to forgive him easy. Not to absolve anyone of anything. Only to outlast the lie long enough to read the whole record. Lucien's version is dead.

The truth belongs to us now—the mercy and the blood both—and what we do with it is the only thing left that decides whether Tom Harrow's death meant a single damn.

32

NICO

The chamber has no windows—only stone older than my oldest memory, and a table that has hosted councils since before I became a vampire. Fifteen seats filled. Three of the elders standing apart near the western wall, unwilling to commit to anything yet. Others stand but haven't once turned toward Riley since she entered, as though refusing to see her keeps her from being real.

She stands at my left with her arms loose and her chin level, a human in a room full of predators who would have killed her a year ago for breathing too loudly. She does not shrink.

Cassandra holds the head of the table—standing, not seated. The records we carried out weeks ago are stacked behind her. She keeps one hand on the nearest, as if it might be taken from her.

"Seal it," says one of the eastern elders. "Collapse the approach. Let it become a rumor no one can verify."

"Burn it," says another. "Every page. We saw what those records do in the wrong hands."

Cass does not raise her voice. "Destroying the vault is the same act we just buried Lucien for attempting. He wanted to decide which truths survived. Now, you do.."

The room goes quiet in a way I recognize—the quiet of people who know they've lost an argument and are deciding whether to admit it.

Gabriel leans against a pillar, arms crossed, easy in the way he gets right before something turns dangerous. "Here's the practical version," he says. "No single house holds the keys. Rotating oversight. Shared security. Field teams drawn from more than one bloodline, so nobody quietly rewrites a page at three in the morning. You want to make certain there's never another First Voice?"

I watch who agrees. It takes another hour of argument. In the end the cases stay. The vault is secured, not destroyed. Cassandra is named keeper of the whole record—every page, every relic, catalogued and guarded for the coalition rather than for any one throne. Then Aurelio, the oldest voice still seated, turns to me.