Page 32 of Vamp CEO Bit You Where?

"Alive. This is turning into a small cage with nice walls."

"Dead isn't free either." He says, quietly, yet he believes it completely.

"I'm not arguing the danger is fake. I know it's real. I'm saying you're answering it by making everything smaller."

He stops. Whatever he wants to say, he doesn't. I leave before I say something I can't take back.

The upstairs room he's given me is too large and too soft. I lower to the rim of the bed with my knees pulled up and listento footsteps in the hall. A knock. Not the door opening—a knock. Gideon waits until I say come in before he does.

"Is your arm okay?" he asks, flicking his eyes to it.

"I'm furious." I blurt out.

I need someone to hear me that isn't Sebastian.

"He locked me in his house."

"He's scared. That's not small with him. I've watched him against worse than what came over the wall today without blinking. You've got him worried."

"Is that supposed to encourage me to forgive him? To feel better?"

"No." A pause. "He's drawn to you Jasmine. You know it. I do too. He doesn't know how to navigate that. He's never had to before. He wants you in the living, not in the dead. He just isn't sure how to still let you have space while keeping you safe. They aren't the same skill."

I look down at the scratch on my forearm. "The awful part," I say, "is that I still want him. After everything."

"Yeah. That's not weakness. You both are drawn to each other. It's not something you just dismiss."

He leaves quietly. I lie back staring at the ceiling. I think about the smoke off the attacker's skin and the way Sebastian's feet left the ground and the gold thread eating into the vampire's wrists. I hear the guards breathing right outside my door. Imagining Sebastian's hands at my pulse, gentle and absolute, and how thin the line is between being held and being imprisoned.

The vampire that came wanted my blood. That much is clear. It's the other danger, Sebastian, locking the doors, not noticing the damage he's causing to me.

20

SEBASTIAN

By the end of that week, the pattern finally shows. The house has been quiet for hours. Not a sound has traveled through the walls. Elias arrives from the lower floor with tired eyes.

"You found something," I say.

"I found something." He stays on his feet. The wall display is already live behind me, the network spread across it in pale threads. He marks the air with two fingers, and the map redraws around six points across the city. "Start here. Four clan envoys, three nights, same banking suite leased under the Vandosse name. Not one house there has spoken to one another in forty years."

"Coincidence."

"I thought so too." He pulls a second layer over the first—courier routes, thin amber lines bending east. "Until I followed the couriers. Every route that touches those meetings crosses a Dain channel. Quietly. Just long enough to hand something off."

Gid follows him, still in last night's clothes. "How long have they been meeting?"

"Months." Elias' voice stays even. "Since before the last meeting with Gregory."

I move closer to the threads. "The exposure incidents. The feeding we had to bury?—"

"Weren't accidents." He brings them up, red flags scattering. "Each one happens in public. Each one forces us to move fast, leave traces, clean sloppy. And each one lands near the council meeting where Dain questioned whether you're still fit to run the information system."

The pattern resolves at once, and I dislike how long it took me. "They weren't trying to expose us."

"No." His attention lands squarely on mine. "They were building a record. Trying to make it look as though you've lost control of the network. Distracted. Compromised."

"By her," Gid says.