Page 45 of Vamp CEO Bit You Where?

Their footsteps move closer, gritty and patient. They aren't rushing. These men have been told there is no need.

The ache for Sebastian rises again. I used to think he was the reason I was in this world of his, and loving him had put a mark on my back. Now the shape changes. My father was already inside this. My family was already a name someone watched. Sebastian did not bring me to it. That does not make what he did right. It makes it harder to hate.

A flashlight beam cuts under my door and slides over the floor. It touches the toe of my boot. I pull my foot back so fast a box shifts. The sound is tiny. To me, it is thunder. The footsteps stop.

"What was that?"

I clamp one hand over my mouth.

Another voice, closer. "This one."

The handle rattles.

My whole body folds in on itself. I am no longer the woman walking into war on her own feet. I am a daughter in a storage unit, crouched behind cardboard, holding the last proof of her father's life while monsters decide which one I'm in.

I press myself into the corner until there is nowhere left to go. I don't think of running or Sebastian. I think of my Dad's note that he wasn't careless. I realize then, with a coldness that empties me out, that my father had known what it felt like to be found.

28

SEBASTIAN

Same night, every answer arrives too late. I'm storming around the lounge waiting for something, anything to come to light about Cyrus. The archives failed, we must break the encryption on that damn file.

I push my palm onto glass, lowering my head and wonder if Jasmine is awake or asleep. I stare at the one picture on my phone of us both and I feel the pull toward her like I'm being dragged through a hedge.

"Give it time," Gid says from behind.

I follow him into the next room, into the dark lit by the street.

"I just want to know she's breathing."

"So does she, probably. Doesn't mean you should corner her to confirm it." He folds his arms. "Truth isn't ownership."

"Sebastian." Elias' voice, flat, from the study.

We go inside.

"The mortal file call Mickey's death a break-in gone wrong — a struggle, blood loss. Too clean. Written to close in a week. Underneath it sits a second record, sealed under Dain authority. His throat," Elias continues. "The coroner's first notes describe two wounds. The final report reclassifies them as glasslacerations, and the originals were ordered destroyed. They weren't. Someone handed the police a robbery and buried the true cause. The originals have Cyrus' stamp on it. It confirms he killed him."

"Why kill a journalist?" I ask, though I already feel it.

"Because he wasn't only a journalist." Elias finally glances at me. "He was a human contact — a liaison the old houses used, before that practice was outlawed. He got close to something he was never meant to find."

"Which was?"

Elias presses a key, and shows me the log.

"A First Vein reading," he says.

The First Vein Index belongs to House Ashford and answers only to the sitting Chair. It is not prophecy as humans imagine. No riddles. No theater. Blood-law. When vampire lineage, human lineage, and mate law intersect, it speaks one warning, once, then seals itself again. It cannot be replayed. Which means whatever Elias has found is not the Index speaking. It is the theft.

"Cyrus got the reading before Gregory," Elias says.

He reads from the recovered notation, each word careful enough to cut.

"A human line will meet a bonded line. Law will bend that has not bent in a thousand years. The mate will stand where no human has stood, in the seat of vampire governance, or the houses will burn keeping her out."

The notation names one bloodline. Carter. Only warns that a daughter of that line would one day stand where our law forbids a human, and the houses would tear themselves open over it.