Page 48 of Vamp CEO Bit You Where?

He sets the folder on a steel table, very precisely, like a man who puts down a thing he'd rather throw. "You'll be useful regardless. Crowe will come to answer for you in front of the clans, and they'll all see what his weakness made him do. Whether you're alive for it—I haven't decided."

He walks toward the dark edge of the light, and the two men step in to take his place, silent, hands folded, patient as furniture.

"Your father lasted three days in a room like this. I'm curious whether stubbornness is inherited or learned," Cyrus says without turning

Then he's gone, and it's just me, the strap, the bolts, the light, and the folder on a table I can't reach—every name my father died keeping, sitting with the man who killed him for it. Somewhere out there is a person who tried to keep me safe the wrong way and would burn the world to do it right, and he is not going to walk through that door in time. None of them are.

I pull against the restraints until my wrists scream. Because I'm his daughter. Because I'd rather break my own hands than sit still and be proof of anything.

30

SEBASTIAN

Before dawn, the old houses gather in the Convocation chamber as though they are waiting for a verdict to be read. I stand at its center where every one of them can visibly see me as they arrive.

Gregory presides from the Chair, grim, the Index closed on the dais before him.

"You asked for standing," Gregory says. "Use it or surrender it."

"I invoke mate-right," I say. "Under old law. Before every house present."

The chamber does not gasp. Instead, their eyes widen and they still — the particular stillness of predators recalculating.

"Name her," Gregory says.

I feel her before I say her name. Not her words — the bond gives me no words, only the raw fact of her. Alive. Trapped, somewhere near the freight routes Elias traced. The pull of it sits like a hook behind my sternum, dragging me toward her. Every instinct I have built wants to leave and take the city apart until I find her. I must finish this before I move.

"Jasmine Carter. Human. I claim her as my mate, and I place her under the protection of old law. Anyone who has taken her, anyone who holds her now, answers to this body for it."

A murmur runs the benches at last. The word 'human' passes house to house like something unclean. In all the years our kind has stood, no one has claimed a human before them, and none here believed they would live to hear it.

An invited elder rises. "She is human." His voice carries plainly, polished and cold, with disgust in it. "You would bind the Convocation to a mortal woman's safety?"

"I would bind it to its own law," I say. "It asks whether she is mine to claim and whether I claim her in truth. I do."

"And her consent?" Gregory asks. Flat. Procedural. A trap for the unwary.

"The claim is protection, not possession. It does not complete the bond. It does not speak for her feelings, her choice, or her future. When she is safe, she decides what she wants — including whether she wants nothing of me. I am here to see that she lives to choose."

That reaches them where ownership never could. The benches tilt toward me, reweighing.

A woman steps from the gallery, voice clean and certain. "Entered into the Index, the claim binds every house here. Protection becomes law the moment the Chair records it. No house may move against her and call it sanctioned."

The elder does not yield. "This is theater. A grieving male dressing want as law."

"Then test the evidence." I turn, not to Gregory, but to the gathered houses. "Cyrus built this coup on murder. Gregory has verified the proof."

Gregory's voice follows mine. "The Chair calls this Convocation to hear evidence already verified under Ashford seal. Cyrus Dain is not here because he was not invited. Hishouse is not represented. This is not a debate with treason. It is the record of it."

Silence drops. Elias steps forward with the recovered notation. He places it before the Chair, then steps back.

"The Vein Index belongs to the Chair alone," Gregory says. "It spoke decades ago, and its warning was stolen before it could be recorded."

He lifts the notation and reads what it said. The chamber fractures into whispers. Carter. Human. Seat. Governance. I let them taste the words.

"The named bloodline was Carter," I say. "Mickey Carter was not only a journalist. He was a sanctioned human liaison, protected under council law. He kept the names of human contacts Cyrus wanted collected. He refused to surrender them."

Gregory takes up the second proof. "The real report was sealed under Dain authority."