Page 47 of Vamp CEO Bit You Where?

Cyrus. The rolling door screams up its track and the light comes in all at once, white and total, and I'm on my feet swinging the folder, screaming, the sound enormous in my own ears and useless everywhere else. Outside is gravel and chain-link and nothing for miles. I scream anyway, because not screaming feels like agreeing.

A hand closes on my arm. It doesn't grab so much as arrive—it's just holding, and then I'm moving, and the world comes apart. Cold air. The slam of a panel. Motions so fast I can't track the turns. The sick lurch of being carried by something that doesn't obey the rules of humanity increases from my stomach.

By the time it stops, the city is gone. Everything except me, and the folder that they peel off me. They put me in a chair bolted to the concrete floor, a strap across each wrist drawn tight making my arms and wrists ache. Around me looks to be a warehouse—steel rafters, a loading door, one work light on astand throwing a hard cone over me and leaving the rest dark. Certainly a place not meant to be found.

Cyrus walks into the light holding my father's folder.

His black hair so dark against his green eyes. "Jasmine. Jasmine. Jasmine," he says, like confirming a delivery. "You hold things just like he did. Too tight."

"You saw him," I say.

"Yes." He licks his finger and turns a page. "A problem I solved a long time ago."

"What is it that you want, Cyrus?"

"Order." He announces it like it answers everything. "We hid for two hundred years because frightened men decided survival meant pretending to be sheep. Liaisons. Treaties. Human mates." A flicker of distaste. "Your kind crept into our law one favor at a time. Fools like Gregory call it progress. I call it rot."

"So you start a war."

"I correct a mistake. Crowe built the machine that keeps us hidden, then fell in love with the thing we were hiding from." He turns to me. "Do you understand what you are, to people like me? Proof. Proof that the strongest of us can be made stupid by a pulse. Every clan is going to see that."

"And him?" I nod at the folder. "Where does my dad fit?"

A flicker of something like pleasure. "He never told you." He taps the cover. "Your father wasn't innocent. He was in it. He knew what we were. He knew names. He sat across tables from my people and wrote it all in his little books."

"That's not a crime."

"It is when the names belong to me."

That snags in him—I hear it, the thing he didn't mean to hand me. "What names?"

"Contacts." The word comes out clipped. "Humans working the seams between your world and mine. I needed his list. Theones who'd talked to him, the ones he was keeping. He had it. He wouldn't give it to me."

And there it is. It opens in me like cold water. My father had a list of people. Cyrus wanted them. My father said no.

"You asked him for names," I say slowly, "and he wouldn't hand them over."

"He was given every chance to be reasonable."

"He was protecting them. From you."

"He was interfering." His voice climbs. "A human deciding which of our affairs he'd permit. Investigating my House like he had the right. Hiding people I had every authority to collect—people the Index should have held years before he buried them. He made himself my business."

"So you killed him."

"I removed an obstruction."

I glance at the folder in his hands and I finally understand what's inside it. Not a confession. Not the scribbling of someone who wandered too close to monsters. A record. A map of everyone he refused to surrender, written down so that if they came for him, he could never be made to forget. He didn't die because he was reckless. He died because he was protecting people. My eyes burn. I don't let them spill. He'd want them to spill.

"You're crying," Cyrus observes, disappointed, like I've finally become predictable.

"No," I say. "You just told me my father was innocent, right there."

The disappointment curdles. I see it now—the scene he'd written before I arrived. The mate breaking. The daughter begging. Proof, for his audience, that human things shatter when you press them. Instead he has a woman strapped to a chair telling him he lost.

"He died screaming," Cyrus says, testing.

"And he still didn't give you the list. So who lost more, in the end?"