Page 7 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

For once, he sounds close to honest. "Whatever my client has dropped me into the middle of, Nico, I want out. The people behind this job, they don't feel like people."

More right than he knows. I let him hang up frightened. Frightened men make mistakes, and mistakes leave trails. But I do not need him to give me her name. I already have it.

I return to the pedestal one last time, close my eyes, and lay two fingers on the velvet where the relic sat through the long evening. There — beneath the freezing cold — a warmth. The faint, blood-warm signature of a human hand that touched what no human was ever meant to touch. The relic answered her. It always answers, and what it leaves behind is as singular as a fingerprint: a thread of living heat, the taste of a pulse, a nerve held steady, a fear swallowed whole instead of shown. I breathe it in until it is mapped into me, until I would know it across a continent.

Chestnut and adrenaline and something low beneath both — a note I mark, catalog, and deliberately walk past. Riley Harrow. The file Cassandra flagged before any of this began, the one whose skill snagged my attention when it should not have. Not a suspect, then. The thief.

My phone lights with Cassandra's name. I answer.

"You have something," she says.

"Harrow. Confirmed by trace."

A slow breath travels down the line. "Then you understand what we are holding now. That relic is not a key to the vault, Nico. It is the first lock. If she opens it — if she so much as solves it⁠—"

"I get it."

"Do you? Lucien's people are already moving. We were not the only ones who felt it wake." Cassandra's voice, normally dry as old paper, carries an edge tonight. "She has a few hours on us and no idea what she is carrying."

Gabriel cuts in from wherever he has perched himself. "Or she knows precisely, and she is better than every one of us. Wouldn't that be a delight."

"It would not," I say.

I am already moving — down the stairs, out the door she used. Cassandra feeds me the threads as I walk: a forged Slovenian passport pinged at the rail station ninety minutes ago, a hired car abandoned across the river, a ring of old broker safehouses she has favored before, scattered from Vienna down to the Adriatic. Riley Harrow does not run in straight lines. She runs in misdirection — she folds her disguises, she leaves two centimeters of wrongness behind to buy herself extra time. It will not be enough. I have a scent, and centuries of never once failing to bring home what I was sent for.

I slide into the car and point it east, toward the dark she vanished into. Calculating the length of time a night's work will take. A week, no more than that.

But my hand keeps returning to the decoy in my coat pocket, and I catch myself turning it over and over like a coin. Like a question I have not been given permission to ask. She's going to be a great deal of trouble, this one.

And the most irritating thing of all is that somewhere in me, long buried, I've begun to look forward to it.

5

RILEY

Rain runs down the window in long crooked lines, and below me the dead bookshop ticks and settles like an old man getting comfortable. I've got the work light angled low, one of those nine-euro clamp lamps you buy in one city and abandon in the next. It throws a hard white circle across the table. In the middle of that sits the relic, and around it, like a tide mark, is a ring of water it has no business making.

Condensation. On a dry table. In a room I haven't bothered to heat, because heat means a glowing window where a shuttered shop should be dark.

"Okay," I say to it. "You're sweating. Cool. Normal rocks do that all the time." It doesn't answer. Good. That would've been a deal-breaker.

My feet are wrecked. I peeled my socks off twenty minutes ago and the soles look like I ran a footrace across a cheese grater, which is roughly accurate. Both palms are scraped raw, the heels gone an ugly pink. Every inhale tugs at my left side, where a railing and I had a disagreement at speed. I press two fingers there and feel the deep bruise answer. Cracked, maybe. I've worked through worse. What I can't work through is this damn cold.

I lift the artifact. Heavier than obsidian should be, denser, and ice straight through. Body heat should've done something. It didn't take. It's pulling warmth the other direction, like it's drinking.

"Weird rich-people nonsense," The mantra worked better an hour ago.

I dig the burner out of the go-bag — packed, zipped, sitting by the door, because the day I leave a bag half-ready is the day I get caught. Forged passports in the lining. A roll of cash. Picks rolled in felt. I thumb Bastian's number from memory and let it ring four times too many.

"You shouldn't be calling this line." His voice is doing the thing where it's smooth on top and shaking underneath.

"And you shouldn't have lied about the security," I say. "Auction muscle doesn't carry what those people were carrying. That wasn't a guard detail, Bastian. That was an army with a dress code."

"Did you get it?"

"Bastian—"

"Did you, Riley."