11. Riley
RILEY
We've been moving all night, changing cars once and names twice.
Venice doesn't trust anyone, which is the only reason I like it.
We come in by a side canal as light turns the color of old brass and the tourists thin into knots of painted faces and wet footsteps.
There's two bridges behind us, a boat mooring to the left, and a dead-end alley that isn't dead if you can climb — and oh can I climb.
Reflections stack in every window, doubling the street, so I read the city twice: once for what's there, once for what's behind us.
Nico is walking the same distance as he did since I've been with him. Especially, since Lucien's name was dropped with a price attached to my head.
"You're crowding me," I say.
"I must do that."
"Knock it off. If somebody's watching, two people glued together is the easiest thing in the world to follow."
His silver eyes cut to the canal, to the reflections, to the rooftops — checking my work, I realize, not dismissing it. "Then walk like you belong here," he says. "You're reading every doorway like a thief."
"I am one."
"Stop advertising that."
I hate that he's not wrong. I drop my shoulders, slow my hands, become a bored woman belonging to a beautiful city. It's a costume. I've worn worse.
The winged lion finds us before we find it — carved over a low water-door beneath a bridge, one paw on a closed book, half its face eaten by salt. Below it, an inscription runs backward, the letters reversed.
"Mirror script," Nico says. "Meant to be read in the water."
"Convenient. The water's filthy."
"It's meant to be read at the right level." He crouches at the canal's edge, where the late light lies flat across the surface, and the reflection catches the carving and flips it true. Words surface through the gloom.
He starts toward the left arch of a door, the one the inscription names.
I don't follow because something about the stone isn't right.
There's a band across the wall above his head — darker, crusted, where centuries of high tides left their mark.
The permanent line. The reflection only reads true when the water touches that band.
Right now the canal sits two feet lower, the stone beneath the tide-line bone-dry.
"Nico."
"I have it."
"You have it at high water." I grab his sleeve. "Look at the line. The reflection's lying to you. Read it now, at this level, and the arches swap. Your left is the wrong one."
He goes motionless, every muscle deciding at once.
He studies the dark tide-band, then the dry stone, then the left arch — and through the gap in it I see what he didn't: a slit in the far wall, angled, and beyond the slit the canal, and beyond that, the dropping sun.
A few more minutes and the light would skip off the water, through that slit, and lay a stripe of late sunlight straight across the floor he was about to stand on. For me, a sunburn. For him, worse.
"Built for someone like you," I say. "Someone who'd trust the symbols over the city."
For a second he doesn't move at all. Then: "Right arch."
We go right. The door gives onto a narrow shelf, and there — set in a niche, dry, waiting — is a disc of dark glass with the next fragment etched across it. Map and a marker. A real one.
That's when the bells start. Not church bells — close, loud, deliberate, the kind that drown a scream.
Three boats slide into the canal mouth, blocking it, and a woman steps onto the bridge above us like she's been there the whole time.
Cropped black hair, blue eyes that don't waste a blink. I know that face.
"You," I say.
The short-haired woman smiles like we're old friends. "You found the correct arch. I had money on you drowning the vampire by accident."
"Cute. Do you rehearse that, or is murder banter part of the uniform?"
"Professional courtesy." She angles her head at the case. "Hand it over and you both walk."
"Counter-offer," I say, and throw it.
Not the disc — a fistful of canal grit, straight at the nearest mercenary's eyes.
The alley erupts. Nico becomes something fast, terrible, and quiet, and three men go down before the third clears his weapon.
I'm already moving — low, sideways. The woman doesn't chase the disc. She watches me, calculating.
The obsidian freezes against me, and the canal's reflection breaks apart — the doubled city smearing, the painted masks above us warping in the black water.
Every sound smears with it, the bells folding into one low note, and a symbol I haven't seen flickers and is gone.
Nico sees it. Across all that violence, he sees it, and whatever's on his face isn't fear of this woman.
A blade comes for my back. He's there before it lands — not blocking it, taking the man entirely, slamming him into the stone which cracks. His hand closes around my arm and pulls me through the right arch, fast, and his grip is hard.
"Move," he says. The word comes out wrong — too low, scraped raw.
We move that fast; we surface three canals over in minutes, soaked and breathing, the bells gone behind us. The woman hasn't followed. She has what she wanted, which was to see how we work. She'll be back.
"Sabine Ward," Nico says.
"You know her?"
"By reputation."
"Of course you do. Why would the woman be the first mystery you actually explain?"
He doesn't say anything, we just keep moving.
We reach a shuttered boathouse, and Nico finally lets go of my arm, leaving finger marks that will bruise.
"You're cut," he says, and reaches for my temple — gentle now, careful, a contradiction to the hand that just left bruises.
"It's a scratch." I don't pull away. Instead, I feel how cold his thumb is against the cut. Up close his gaze is enigmatic, the silver gone luminous. "Why'd you grab me like the boat was already gone?"
He doesn't answer at first. Then: "Because for a moment I thought it was."
"That's not strategy."
"No." He stops there. He's good at stopping there.
I let the quiet sit, because pushing won't move him and I know what it's like to be backed against your own walls.
"I've spent my whole life being the one nobody could pin down.
Now there's a price on my head and a man who watches me like I'll vanish if he blinks.
I don't get to be free. I get to be valuable.
I hate it. I hate that the difference is starting to matter. "
His hand is still at my face. Neither of us moves. The boathouse creaks, water slapping the hull below, and the space between us goes thin and warm and dangerous. Then he steps back.
"The disc," he says.
I pull it out. The new symbol is gone, but the map fragment holds — clear, real, the next point on a trail somebody built a long time ago to lead someone exactly here.
"It answered me," I say quietly. "Not the map. Me." I make him meet my eyes. "You felt it too."
His phone vibrates before he can answer. Nico looks at the screen, and whatever he sees shuts his face down.
"Stay here," he says.
"Love being managed."
He steps outside anyway, voice dropping too low for me to catch. I hear only one word through the warped wood.
"Cassandra."
I note he doesn't deny it answered to my skin. That's the part that scares me — that for the first time, Nico doesn't have an answer ready, and he won't tell me why.