Page 37 of Vamp CEO Bit You Where?

"Here is what changes," I say. "No more watching you. No threat that reaches me about you that I don't tell you about. Every decision about your safety, you make with me or you make instead of me. No detail arranged to keep you where I want you. If you want all gone tomorrow, it's gone."

"And if I still don't trust you?"

"Then I earn it, or I don't earn it at all. But I don't buy it back."

She lets out a breath that is almost a laugh, exhausted and unwilling. "That's the most romantic thing you've ever said. God help us both."

It is the closest we come. She is an arm's length away and I 'm drawn to closing it, but I don't. Elias is on the staircase. He's waited to speak until I see him.

"It can wait," I tell him.

"It can't." He doesn't have a folder. He doesn't have a screen. He just says it. "Cyrus moved. Not against the network. Against you. A communication went out on the council's secure channel half hour ago. It's already with every House."

"Saying what?"

"That you've compromised the neutrality of the information network for personal reasons. That you spent vampire secrecy and political capital on one human woman. He's named her. He's pulled her employment history with Whitaker — the dispute, the work she was accused of mishandling. He's calling it documented volatility. A human scandal imported into vampire governance. He's asking the Council to consider oversight.Restriction of her proximity to the system. Removal of your unilateral control."

Jasmine has gone very still. I understand exactly what has happened. Every private failure I just confessed to her, Cyrus has dressed in council language and handed to my enemies. He took the truest, ugliest thing about me and made it a motion on a floor. And he reached into the worst thing that was done to her — Owen, who is nothing, who is just a small grasping man — and made her the liability.

The old me knows precisely what to do. Send her upstairs. Lock the channel. Answer Cyrus and tell her later, the cleaned version, the protected version. I look at her. She is watching to see which man I am.

"Read it to her," I tell Elias.

He hesitates.

"Now."

Elias speaks aloud. Not quickly. Not cruelly. He gives each sentence enough space to grow teeth, and Jasmine absorbs every one without flinching. When Owen's name appears, her face does not crumble. It sharpens. That hurts worse, because Cyrus has not invented damage. He located an old cut, washed it, labeled it, and passed it around a room of predators as evidence. My secrecy made that wound searchable. It gave him the index. The apology from five minutes ago is already obsolete.

It's the right choice and it comes too late to be a gift. Jasmine listens to her own life turned into ammunition, then she turns to me, and I see her understand what I'm only now learning — that honesty isn't something I can give her anymore.

23

JASMINE

Elias disappears back up the staircase. Sebastian and I go to the study.

He's not guessing.Elias had said.Dain has the real version. Your history. The gaps Sebastian filled. The reputation Owen left you with. He'll use it because it's true.

Now it's only us, and the network shining bright next to us.

Instead of sitting, I choose to go closer to Sebastian. Being near him used to steady me, but tonight, I feel as though I'm holding my breath.

"He turned my life into a weapon," I say. "Cyrus just picked up what was already lying around."

"That's who he is." Sebastian doesn't touch me.

"Do you? Because what scares me isn't Cyrus."

His throat works. "Yes."

The single word lands harder than a defense would.

"You usually have more than that."

"I've run out of excuses or where I explain and you forgive me." He finally looks at me. "I keep waiting to feel like I made the right choice. I didn't. I made the safe one."

I came armored for him to wrap the harm in love until it looked like a gift. He doesn't, and that's worse.