Guarded By the Steel Seraph (Monster Security Agency #14)

Chapter One – Jessa

Chapter One

Jessa

Two bodyguards have failed and I still owe the bank twenty thousand dollars. And please, let’s not mention my other debts.

I tap my fingers on the conference table and watch Yasmin Bayard choose her words carefully.

She has a folder open in front of her that she hasn’t looked at once.

Outside the window, London is doing what London does in November, which is exist under a sky the color of wet concrete and make no apologies for it.

“Miss Holloway, the agency wants to express its sincere regret,” Yasmin says, “regarding the outcomes of the previous two assignments.”

“You said that on the phone.”

“I wanted to say it in person.”

I stop tapping my fingers.

“I appreciate that. But I drove five hours to get here, and it wasn’t for an apology.”

I truly hope this is the last time I need to make the trip from Cornwall to London, and back again. After this, the only trip I want to make is back home to New York. With my pockets full.

She nods. She has the posture of someone who delivers difficult news regularly and has made her peace with it – shoulders straight, hands still, expression measured. She is good at her job. I can tell because she hasn’t flinched once, and I have been staring at her since I sat down.

“You gave us your requirements,” she says.

“I did.”

“And we have someone who meets them.”

That is why I’m here.

That is why I took the bank loan in the first place, why I came back to Cornwall after the first failure and the second, why I didn’t listen to my mom when she called me late at night and said, with the exhaustion of a woman who’s been afraid for a very long time, that she needed me to stop.

She tried the vault herself, years ago. Mr. Tremaine, the keeper of Hollowmere Castle, pulled her out of the tunnels and half carried her back to the gatehouse. She came home to New York with a broken arm, a permanent limp, and a determination to keep me away from Hollowmere.

The Holloways were wealthy for centuries, and then they weren’t. Because that is what happens to old families that confuse luck with permanence. Bad investments, gambling debts, political misjudgments, and the quiet drain of heirs dying in pursuit of a vault they couldn’t reach – it adds up.

By the 1800s, the castle was falling apart. In 1889, the last of the English Holloways packed up and emigrated to America, leaving Hollowmere behind. What followed was a long, slow slide through generations of diminishing returns, until the name was all that remained. The name, and the vault.

My mom and I live in a cramped apartment in New York, splitting rent and bills we can barely cover.

But the Holloway fortune is real. I’ve seen the historical records, the ledgers, the accounts of what the family accumulated over four centuries of tin mining, shipping, and, later, smuggling.

It’s all locked in a vault, deep in the cave system beneath Hollowmere Castle, on the north Cornwall coast, and it can only be opened with Holloway blood.

The traps standing between the entrance and the vault have killed or broken every heir who came before me, including my mother and her mother before her.

I spent two years going through every piece of family documentation I could find before I went the first time. Every Holloway before me went alone. I decided I wouldn’t, that I would do what none of them had thought to do, which was hire help. Not human help.

Monster Security Agency is the best private security firm in the world, and their operatives are monsters. They are also expensive, which is why I now have a bank loan. I calculated that if I succeeded, I could pay the bank back, clear my student debt, and finally start my life.

My first bodyguard failed. My second one too.

Two failures. Twenty thousand dollars. A debt I can’t service on a psychologist’s salary I don’t yet earn.

Because the practice I want to open, which would treat the patients everyone else has given up on – the narcissists, sociopaths, and the people with the kinds of minds that frighten other clinicians – requires money I don’t have.

And won’t have unless I get into that vault.

The bank was patient once. There is a limit to that patience, and I am aware of it every day.

A few days ago, when I called Yasmin and informed her the second bodyguard had failed, I also told her exactly what I needed.

Someone that doesn’t breathe underwater.

Someone that doesn’t bleed.

Someone that can’t be poisoned.

I told her that clearly and without room for interpretation, because I’ve been in those tunnels twice now, and I know what they demand. I’m not going back with anything less.

She said she had one option.

“Before he arrives,” Yasmin says, “there are some things you should understand.”

“About this bodyguard.”

“Yes.” She folds her hands on top of the folder. “He has never taken a female client before.”

I look at her. “Why not?”

“He is very old.” She says it carefully, like she’s testing the weight of each word.

“His values were formed in another era. Literally, not figuratively. He operates under a personal code that has governed him for centuries, and that code is traditional. He comes from a time when men and women had very fixed roles, and he hasn’t revised that position. ”

“But he’s agreed to this.”

“He has.”

“Is he going to be a problem?”

She doesn’t answer immediately, and in that pause, I read everything she isn’t saying.

She cares about this one. It’s in the tension at the corner of her mouth, the way her hands press slightly flatter against the folder.

Yasmin Bayard is professionally neutral about everything and everyone, except whoever is about to walk through the door of this conference room.

“He will complete the assignment,” she says. “His record is without exception. He has never failed a protection detail.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“He will be professional. What he feels about the arrangement, he keeps to himself. I can promise you that.”

I let it go.

“What species is he? You haven’t said.”

Something crosses her face. It might be pride.

“We call them steel seraphim.”

I turn the words over. Steel. Seraphim.

“I’m not familiar with that.”

“Most people aren’t. There are only twelve in existence. He can explain more than I can, if you ask him.”

I want to ask more. I don’t know where to start, so I don’t start anywhere. I sit with it.

Yasmin refills her coffee and I decline when she offers, because my hands are already restless.

And I’ve had this cough for ten days that won’t leave, a cold that’s been dragging and testing my patience.

I pull my sleeves down over my wrists and look at the window. The street below is gray and ordinary.

My mom doesn’t know I’m here. She thinks I’m still coordinating with the MSA remotely, buying time, that I haven’t committed to a third attempt yet.

Yasmin slides a document across the table and walks me through it, clause by clause.

The contract covers the assignment parameters, what Monster Security Agency guarantees and what it doesn’t.

She points to a section near the bottom and tells me that given the nature of the location and the absence of any communication possibilities underground, the agency cannot be held responsible for outcomes inside the tunnel system itself.

I sign where she indicates without arguing, because I already knew this. The only person responsible for what happens in those tunnels has always been me.

Yasmin is mid-sentence on the final clause when she stops.

Her eyes go to the door.

There’s a shift in the air that raises the hair on my nape. I turn in my chair.

The door opens.

He angles his shoulders to fit through the frame. That’s the first thing – the adjustment he makes, the slight turn that says he’s been navigating spaces built for smaller beings for a very long time. Then he’s inside, and he straightens, and I understand why the room feels different.

He is enormous. Seven feet at least, broad through the shoulders in a way that is structural, because there is no flesh, no muscle, nothing organic.

He is built from interlocking plates of steel, silver-gray, the joints and seams visible at his neck and arms, every part of him suggesting something assembled rather than born.

His face is a smooth steel mask, no features, no eyes – only two narrow slits where eyes would be, and behind them a steady silver glow. I’ve spent years reading faces, and this one gives me nothing, because there is no face to read.

Behind his shoulders, folded close against his back, there are wings. Steel, like the rest of him. I didn’t expect wings.

“Castien.” Yasmin stands. “Thank you for coming.”

“Yasmin.”

His voice is made of two tones, one underneath the other, the lower one metallic and resonant, like a second voice living inside the first.

“I’d like to introduce your client.” She gestures across the table toward me. “Jessa Holloway.”

He turns his head and looks at me.

His eyes hold mine and don’t move, and I hold them back. I’ve sat across from men who use eye contact as a weapon, and I’ve learned not to flinch. But this is different. There is no aggression in his gaze. There’s only his attention, full, total, and fixed.

He doesn’t offer his hand. He doesn’t even speak to me. He stands at the far end of the table and looks at me the way you look at a problem you’ve been handed without asking for it.

I’m not afraid. I register this the way I register everything – as data, as information about the situation. He is seven feet of steel and silence, and he’s looking at me like I’m an inconvenience.

He, however, is exactly what I need.

He doesn’t breathe, and he has no skin that can be pierced and bled. Whatever challenges await in those tunnels, traps that kill, poison, or drown… None of it can touch him.