Page 6 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

NICO

The auction house has the particular hush of money trying very hard not to scream.

I step through the service entrance into the main gallery, and the chaos resolves itself around me. Two of the palace's private guards stand at the eastern doors with their weapons drawn and pointed at nothing. A woman in couture weeps into a champagne flute she has forgotten she is holding. Above us, a chandelier the size of a small car throws fractured light across a crowd that paid a fortune to be here and would now pay double to be anywhere else.

In the center of all of it sits the display case, and the case is empty. I cross to it without hurrying. Hurrying is for people who have already lost, and I've not lost — only arrived late, which is its own insult. The pedestal is bare. No shattered glass, no forced hinge. Whoever took the relic opened the case with intent, leaving the body otherwise undisturbed.

Then I see the decoy. It rests on the velvet where the relic should be, carved black resin with the right weight, the right silhouette, the right lie under low light. Off-center by perhaps two centimeters. Small enough for panic to miss. Large enough telling me the drop went wrong. I lift it, turn it in my fingers. Warm, where the real thing would have been anything but. The relic is never simply warm.

A laugh wants to climb out of me. I don't let it. But the impulse is there, and that is interesting. I let my senses unspool through the room. Beneath perfume, panic, champagne, and gun oil, there is a path. I follow it with my eyes first, because eyes look less impossible in front of witnesses. The service-corridor door has been propped, not broken. A folded catering napkin keeps the latch from catching on the return. A cloned staff credential lies discarded on a side table, its chip scorched black. She didn't disable the corridor cameras. She routed herself along the single seam where their arcs never quite overlap. That took study. That took floor plans. That took someone who walked this building in her mind a dozen times before she ever set foot in it.

In the alley, I find the shoes. Low heels, kicked aside beneath a rusted drainpipe, one lying on its side as if it died offended. A scrap of dark silk clings to a nail by the service exit. Not discarded in panic. Shed in sequence. Dress, hair, shoes, identity.

The trail climbs. The drainpipe still holds the faint warmth of recent hands. Above, the roofline cuts black against the August sky. I follow it up fast while no one is looking, silent over wet brick and cold metal, until the city opens beneath me in gold and shadow.

Across the slate, leading to the parapet and the four-meter gap to the next building, runs a line of bare footprints in the grime. She took her shoes off and made the jump barefoot. Traded elegance for grip. Vanity for survival. Two tiles at the lip are scuffed pale where her toes pushed off. I crouch at the edge and consider the dark distance she chose to cross rather than be taken.

"You are out of your mind," I tell the empty air, and I find I mean it as something close to admiration, which irritates me far more than the theft itself.

Back inside, they have produced someone for me to break. The auction director is a soft man named Emil Novotný, gray at the temples, sweating through good tailoring. He has been told who I represent. He has not been told what I am, but some old animal inside him knows to keep his palms where I can see them.

"Mr. Serrano." His English is careful. "We are doing everything we⁠—"

"Sit." He listens. I have not raised my voice. I never do; volume is what men reach for when they have run out of control, and I have not run out of anything. "The obsidian lot. Your registered bidders."

"That information is confidential, I—" He stops, because I have set both hands flat across the tabletop and leaned in, and whatever he reads in my face rearranges his priorities. "Four. Four private bidders. One withdrew the morning of the sale."

"Names."

He gives them. Three mean nothing. The fourth makes my chest cold, quiet, and attentive. Casimir Armand.

I find him in the antechamber, holding court with no one, a glass of something red he is not drinking. Casimir wears his age easily, expensively, with the faint contempt earned by watching empires apologize and fall. He tilts his head a precise degree when he sees me.

"Serrano. They sent the Black Fang after a trinket." A smile that plainly costs him effort. "It must be a very special trinket."

"You wanted it."

"I want a great many things." His tone stays light. Beneath the silk of him I can feel the fury, banked and patient and possessive as a buried fire. "I came to bid, like a gentleman. Someone else preferred the cruder method." He turns the glass slowly. "If you reach her before I do, do give her my regards."

Her. He is already certain of the gender, and he has no business being certain — not unless he knows more than a disappointed bidder should. Casimir is a problem for a later night.

My screen lights. Graves, at last, returning the call I left coiled around his evening like a noose.

"Nico." Bastian's voice is all oil and apology. "Terrible business. Tragic. I had no idea, you must believe⁠—"

"You brokered the floor access."

"I facilitated an introduction. That is all. I move paper, you know this, I am a middleman⁠—"

"You moved a thief into a sealed room, Bastian, and now you are going to give me her name."

"I know the alias," he says carefully. "Vivian Cole. I know the reputation. Best in Europe, no questions, no attachments, no mess. That was the entire point of her."

"You hired her."

"I passed along a contract." His voice thins. "There is a difference."

"Not one that will save you."