7. Riley
RILEY
Three exits. Front door, swollen in its frame, bolt thrown.
Window over the sink, painted shut a decade ago, but glass breaks.
The service stair at the back, narrow enough that a big man would have to turn his shoulders to take it.
I've spent forty minutes learning the place by feel, just in case I have to leave in a hurry.
My palm's stopped bleeding. I work the dried rust out of the lines with a wet rag, slow and careful, watching the water swirl pink down the drain. The cut is shallow. I don't remember earning it. Somewhere between Prague and Vienna, my body started keeping secrets from me.
The obsidian is in a case beside a lamp.
The relic's chill runs through me in a slow throb, weird and unnatural.
I keep blaming the fact it's an obsidian stone.
The half-drawn map glows faint inside the lid—thin silver lines, a route that quits before it commits to anything, like it's enjoying this.
"Overpriced rock," I mutter. "Eccentric billionaires. Victimless."
I swear I'm going crazy, because it's not like the rock will laugh.
I'm reaching to shut the case when I notice it.
Not a sound—the lack of one. A floorboard out in the hall that should groan under the settling of an old building, gone quiet, like something's standing on it to keep it still.
Outside, a car that's idled too long finally cuts its engine, and the silence after is wrong.
Too whole. The kind of silence that's waiting on something.
My heartbeat climbs. I don't let my hands know about it. I pocket the case, kill the lamp, and put my back to the wall by the service stair.
The door doesn't burst inward. That's the first thing that frightens me.
It opens like it was always going to. A man comes through it like he owns it—unhurried, certain, not a single wasted motion.
Tall. A black coat that swallows what's left of the light.
The men in Prague crowded the air with shouting and bad cologne.
This one fills it just by standing in it.
"Riley Harrow."
I hate how he says my name. Like he's read me front to back and found the ending dull.
"Wrong guesthouse," I pipe up. "The brooding-predator package is two doors down."
"You took something that isn't yours." His voice is flat, nearly bored. "You don't have the faintest idea what it is."
"See, that's the thing everybody loves to open with." I drift a half-step toward the stair. "Nobody's lining up to finish the sentence."
"Hand me the case, and you walk out of here."
"Counteroffer. Tell me what I stole, and I will consider it."
"You stole a war," he says. "You just haven't heard it start yet."
Then he moves. I throw the lamp—not at him, at the cracked window behind him—and he tracks the crash, I'm already three stairs down.
I make it four. His hand closes on my collar like a slammed door and the whole world hauls backward.
I twist, drive an elbow where a throat should be, and it lands, he grunts, and I'm free for exactly one breath before he has my wrist.
So I do the thing he won't see coming. I quit fighting the grip and crack the relic's case straight up into his jaw.
It startles him. A flicker that isn't pain, something almost like surprise that the rabbit went for his teeth.
Then his fingers find my wrist again and there's nothing I can do, nothing, his strength belongs to a category I have never once met, and he drags me in close that I count the gray lines in his stare—
And he stops. All of him, at once. The grip that could've broken my arm goes slack.
His gaze takes the dark and turns it bright, too bright, lit from somewhere underneath like coals pulling breath.
Whatever he came here to do to me twists into something else across his face, a crack tearing through all that marble.
"No," he says. Barely a sound. "Impossible."
The air between us changes. I have no word for it. It's pressure, a storm still three seconds out, the floor tilting without moving an inch. Every instinct I own is screaming one note—danger, run—and I can't tell whose it is, his or mine.
I don't stay to work it out. I rip free—he lets me, or he's too wrecked to stop me, I'll never know which—and that's when the window blows in.
Not a brick. A canister. It hits the boards spitting hard white light, surgical, and the men pouring after it don't shout.
They come in a clean wedge—masks, matte gear, stubby finned weapons that hum like something charging.
One swings toward me. A clipped word I don't know, like a passphrase, and the case in my fist goes to ice and flares.
Light floods out of it. The lead man flinches, his goggles whining dead, and that gap is all I want. I put a chair to the backs of his knees and drop him.
The man in black is already moving, and God help me, I've never seen anything alive move like that. Too fast to track. One of them's standing, then he's not, then the plaster wears him. It isn't fighting. It's something older and uglier, and I'm staring straight at it and still can't make a word.
A barrel swings to my spine. I don't see it. He does. He's between us before the trigger finishes its pull, the round meant for me thudding into him instead—and he doesn't drop. He rounds on me. "Down—stay down." Rough, livid, like shielding me is a personal insult.
I hate that I notice. A man who wanted this stone ninety seconds ago just took a bullet with my name on it. The relic burns against me, freezing through cotton, and for one impossible beat the whole map blooms at the base of my skull—every line, complete—then dies to nothing.
Then it's done. Bodies. Smoke. The two of us breathing ragged in the ruins of my clean exit.
Bastian's neat little plan flashes through me—lift it, hand it off, disappear, collect. Bastian, whose drop is somewhere out there, worthless now, same as everything else.
"More are coming." He drags the door open. Under all that command, his palms aren't steady, and he knows I can see it. "We go. Now."
"We?" I let my voice crack. "I don't even know what or who you are."
He turns those too-bright eyes on me, the broken thing still loose behind them.
"You have no idea," he says.
I follow him out the door anyway.