Page 46 of Vamp CEO Bit You Where?

"Cyrus heard this," I say.

"Cyrus stole it. Only the Chair should ever have this reading. Gregory never knew — he couldn't. The Index speaks once, andit should have sealed in his vault. Somehow it didn't. Cyrus intercepted it before it surfaced."

So Cyrus has known for years that one human line might reshape the law he has spent his existence defending. He killed Mickey for getting close, buried him to keep the reading hidden, and has worked the long game ever since: outlawing human liaisons, erasing surviving contacts, breaking any leader who might open a door for a human mate.

He did not start this war because of me. He started it the day Mickey got too close.

Gregory acceptsus at his office before dawn. He offers nothing, has not slept; the old ones rarely do.

"You came armed with words," he says. "Speak them."

Elias sets a single thing into the light — the recovered seal, its mark turned upward.

Gregory goes white. The centuries move behind his eyes as he reads the mark of the Index — and the warning no living vampire but the Chair should ever have heard.

"This is sealed," he says. "It answers to me. Only to me."

"It answered to Cyrus on this one," I say. "Decades ago. He took it somehow, killed the man whose bloodline it named, and has buried human contacts ever since — to keep one girl from standing where this warning says she might."

"There is only one way he could have learned this," Gregory says. "He was inside and close to hear what the Index spoke before it sealed. You understand what you are accusing him of."

"Treason against council law. Theft of the Chair's own instrument. The murder of a sanctioned human liaison." I hold his gaze.

He looks, and for a long while says nothing. Pushing an old one only makes him dig in.

Gregory opens an old channel and sends one sentence under the Ashford seal: Cyrus Dain violated the Chair. The answer comes immediately. Northern lines wake first, then eastern, then two houses that had spent weeks pretending neutrality. He sets the seal down. "They were waiting for permission to abandon him."

Not victory. Cyrus still holds the network, loyal houses, Vandosse's silence. But the wall has shifted at last.

"There has to be a Convocation," I say. "A Blood Convocation, before all the houses. Treason against a human contact and theft of the Index cannot be tried in secrecy."

"You know what a Convocation invites." His voice is flint. "Once those doors open, every secret in the room becomes fair game. Yours among them."

"I know exactly what it invites."

"The evidence is too grave to bury. I will call it."

I should feel relief. Instead the heaviness of it settles onto me like the first brick laid down. Because I know what I will do. I will stand before every house that has named Jasmine a weakness, and claim her as my mate under the oldest law we keep. Not to own her — never that. To give her a name their law cannot erase, to make them call her a person before they can call her prey.

She will still choose. Whatever she decides, she will decide free. But the world she chooses in will no longer be permitted to treat her as nothing.

"Then we have very little time," I say — and begin to plan how to break two hundred years of silence in a single sentence.

That is when Elias reaches my side, his voice pitched for me alone.

"A Dain vampire took Jasmine from a Carter storage unit. Yard footage caught them. They crossed the river ninety minutes ago."

My body goes cold.

Elias continues, fast. "The trail goes dark near a freight depot tied to the route that removed Mickey's docket."

29

JASMINE

Minutes later, the door comes up, and a third voice cuts through the shutter noises. Two men go quiet like they fear the person.

"Open it," the third voice says.