Page 42 of Vamp CEO Bit You Where?

I left because I don't feel the need to be protected. I'm not running to be saved. I am going to find out who put that letter in my kitchen, and who bought that ticket. This war found me on my own. Fine. Then I meet it on my own feet.

26

SEBASTIAN

Three days after, the network starts bleeding harder. "Suppress the garage clip," I say. "Reroute through?—"

"Already mirrored and decaying," Elias says without looking up. "It'll read as a hoax by morning. Lisbon's the problem. Cyrus isn't taking the network. He's making it bleed where humans can watch."

Controlled bursts. A man who wants me to look unfit, not destroyed. There's a difference, and Cyrus has always got that.

I have not slept in two days, since Jasmine left. The bond keeps reminding me of it. I keep busy, ignoring the pull, and fight what Cyrus and his clan are doing.

"Munich's gone quiet," Elias says.

"Good. Everything is salvageable."

It would be simpler to lock her away in a sealed cell. Have people at every single door. Her safe is better than her dead. Each thought that rises, I bury, because I have this war to deal with. Gid comes without knocking, sets a cup of something black in front of me.

"Drink that," he says.

"I'm working."

"You're swaying." He turns a chair, sits with his arms folded over the back. He doesn't say the rest. He's said it before, and he knows I've stopped hearing it.

I notice a silence between us all that I'm not used to. Elias has stopped clicking the mouse, and Gid isn't moving papers. I turn to see what is going on, and Elias' face is in a state of shock.

"What?"

"Permissions just contradicted themselves." His fingers move. "There's a record in one archive that shouldn't render for me. It's reading as deleted and sealed."

"Cyrus' people, poking at the archive?"

"No. This is old. But I think they are attempting to get to it." He turns the screen — a directory tree, half of it corrupted into symbols. "The metadata's stripped, but there's a name buried in it."

"A name?" He doesn't answer right away. "Elias."

"Carter," he says. "Mickey Carter."

"Her father died in a robbery," I say. "Twenty years ago. A mugging gone wrong. She told me." I don't replay the other information — the two small wounds at the throat the coroner couldn't explain.

"He's not filed as a robbery victim," Elias says. "He's filed as a mortal exposure risk. Human investigative contact. Monitored, classified, then—" he scrolls, "—buried inside restricted records. Not police records. Ours."

"Read it."

"I can't. That's the point. The file is protected under an old authority. All I have is the corrupted version. We didn't simply kill him and forget him. We documented him."

"So she's been grieving a story we wrote."

Jasmine has carried that grief for years, and underneath it the whole time was a lie with our fingerprints on it.

"The seal," I say. "Whose authority?"

"Stripped. But the suppression order that moved the file carries a partial mark. Dain-side."

Decades. Long before I ever felt the floor of my life shift when I met her. She wasn't pulled into this because of me. Her Dad had been in this world already. The bond made me her ending. That's not why Cyrus is coming for her, he's doing it to protect himself. Cyrus must believe she inherited whatever Mickey found. He may think she carries answers she's never once heard spoken aloud. Which makes her more dangerous to him empty than full.

"I can't open the file," he says at last. "But the suppression order references a physical packet. A sealed council docket, archived off-network the year Mickey died. If it still exists, it's in the old western vault. Whoever sealed it trusted the archives over servers."