Taste of Trust
DRACO
Traffic dragged us through Manhattan one block at a time.
I sat in the back of the car with the incident manifests from the masquerade open on my knee. The same paragraph had been staring up at me for ten minutes, full of witness statements, security failures, and the names of people who would need to be questioned before sunrise.
I had not absorbed a word of it.
Nico sat beside me, quiet enough that anyone else might have mistaken him for calm.
I knew better now. His stillness had edges.
He was watching the city through the glass, one hand resting near the cuff of his sleeve, his thumb worrying at a loose thread as though the answer to any of this might be hidden in the seam.
Across from us, Amara worked through the damage on her phone with the steady patience of someone sorting a dinner reservation rather than the aftermath of a supernatural murder.
I had asked Nico to come with me.
The decision had made sense at the time, or at least I had dressed it in enough sense to get it past myself.
He had seen the body. He had seen the card.
Leaving him behind would have meant more questions, more doors closed in his face, more of that particular look he got when he knew he was being managed.
So I had brought him.
Now he was close enough that the warmth of him occupied the car as surely as the leather seats and the rain-dark windows, and I was pretending to read reports while every old instinct in me kept turning toward him instead.
That was inconvenient. It was also no longer surprising.
“So how is Remy doing at the shop?”
Nico turned from the window. “Evie is making him earn every second of it.”
“That sounds like he’s having a rough time.”
“She had him re-catalogue the entire Victorian silver section by noon. He didn’t complain, which I think surprised her more than anything.” Nico looked down and turned the ring on his finger. “He’s trying, Draco. He actually looks like he’s trying.”
“I know.”
His gaze lifted. “You’ve been checking?”
“I made arrangements. It would be careless not to follow up.”
“That’s what you’re calling it?”
“It is accurate enough.”
A small silence opened between us.
“I’m not going to pretend I know why you did it, or turn it into something you’re not comfortable with it being. I just—” He stopped, his mouth pressing together for a second before he tried again. “Thank you. That’s all.”
I looked at the manifests.
“Don't make it bigger than it is,” I said. “Addicts in debt are unstable. Easy to leverage, easy to manipulate, easy to weaponize by anyone who wants a clean line to the people they love. Getting Remy clean was risk management.”
“Sure,” Nico said, like he believed approximately none of that.
I was not born kind. I knew that. I'd been shaped by centuries of surviving things that killed gentler people, and what that process produced was not goodness
“We're arriving,” Amara said, without looking up from her phone.
Thank fuck.
The coven’s building had old money in its bones.
The vampires who lived there had done nothing to warm it. They had stripped away the softness and left only marble, dark wood, and the cold restraint of a house that had learned to grieve without making a sound.
A leader had died inside my house. That fact sat in the chest of everyone we walked past, not as sorrow — vampires didn't do sorrow publicly, not in the human way of it — but as a recalibration.
The acting leader, Petra, was three centuries old. She received us in a study lined with portraits of people important enough to be remembered and looked at me like she hadn't decided yet whether I was a resource or a complication.
I sat without being offered the chair, because waiting was its own negotiation and I wasn't here to negotiate.
“Your master held his territory longer than most men hold a promise,” I said. “I acknowledge the blood ended.”
The formal words did their work. Petra's spine straightened a fraction. The air in the room shifted by one degree.
“Reed, you understand we have questions about what happened inside your hospitality.”
“I have the same questions. That's why I'm here instead of sending a letter.” I held her eyes. “Take me through the night. When was he last seen, who did he speak to, which direction did he go, and what did your security notice that they haven't told you yet because they're afraid of the answer.”
Petra's jaw tightened. “My security—”
“I'm not here to assign blame, Petra. So either give it to us or we walk. It is that simple.”
She gave it to us.
Nico stood slightly behind me and said nothing. But he was snooping around the house thinking that nobody would notice.
“There's something behind that cabinet,” he said, quietly, to me and nobody else.
Petra crossed the room and opened it properly and showed us the false back panel and the thin sheaf of documents behind it that her master had apparently decided to hide from his own security team in the last week of his life.
I took the documents, glanced at the top page, and handed them to Amara without showing my face to Petra.
“Who else knows these exist?” I asked.
“Nobody. Until now.”
“Keep it that way.” I stood. “If anything else was moved, touched, hidden, or cleaned before my people arrived, I want to know.”
Petra’s mouth tightened.
“What?” I asked.
“One of mine saw Sabine during the second hour.”
The room changed around the name.
“It was only a glimpse near the east corridor, and by the time my guard doubled back, she was gone.” Petra added.
“And you are only telling me this now?”
“My man wasn’t certain it was her.”
“He is certain now?”
Petra looked at the body on the marble.
“Yes.”
I turned to Amara. “Find her.”
“Alive?”
“For now,” I said. “I want to know what she came here to leave behind.”
The Crimson Room felt strange in the off hours, stripped of the noise and bodies that usually gave it a reason to exist.
The chairs were stacked on the tables. The lights had been lowered to a dull red glow, and the scent of blood had been pressed beneath bleach, polish, and the stale air of a room waiting for night to make sense of it again.
I entered through the back, went up to my office, and stood behind the desk with my hands flat on the wood.
Sabine did not kill coven leaders for the pleasure of it. She liked clean profit, cleaner contracts, and damage that could be denied before breakfast. A public murder in another man's ballroom was too crude for her taste and too visible for her pride.
That was what made it useful.
Vane had not sent her to be careful. He had sent her to be seen. He wanted the body found on the marble. He wanted the houses whispering before sunrise. He wanted every guest who had walked out of my masquerade to carry the story with them and improve it in the telling.
The careful years were over.
He had decided to stop waiting.
The decanter left my hand before I made a conscious decision to throw it. It hit the far wall and burst apart, crystal and amber scattering across the plaster and floor in one bright, useless act of destruction.
Amara did not flinch.
I righted the chair beside the desk, considered putting it through the window, and set it down instead.
I was not twenty anymore, and property damage came with invoices.
“He's done waiting,” I said.
“He can afford to send more than one message,” Amara said.
“I know.”
“And if he's worked out what Nico is to you...”
“I know.” I cut her off, because saying it aloud made it more solid than I could stand to have it.
Nico spoke from the doorway. “Amara. Can you give us a minute?”
I nodded to her that it was fine. She went, and the door closed behind her, and Nico crossed the room and stopped in front of me.
“Who's Vane? Everyone says the name like I'm supposed to flinch, and I don't, because nobody's told me why. So tell me.”
“Marcellus Vane is the oldest vampire still walking this continent. Older than me by two centuries. In our world that isn't only time, it's accumulated power. He runs what passes for an aristocracy among us.”
“And his grudge with you?”
I picked a shard of crystal off the floor and set it on the desk, because standing still was beginning to feel impossible.
“A long time ago, on a battlefield under a moon that would not set, Vane killed the person I loved most in the world.”
Nico's jaw tightened, and I watched him arrive at the name a half second before he said it, the way a man arrives at a bruise he already knew was there.
“Cassiel.”
“Yes.”
Neither of us said anything for a moment. He had stood in the library and looked at that portrait, at a face that was not his own but wore some of the same architecture, and he had not flinched from it then either, which I had noticed and not known what to do with.
“Vane killed him on that battlefield,” I said, “with an arrow meant for me that never should have reached him. I have spent centuries wishing I had taken Vane's head that day instead of standing over Cassiel's body deciding how I was going to survive losing him.”
Nico's face had gone pale in a way I did not like. “And he put the arrow in Cassiel himself.”
“With his own hand.”
“The man hunting me,” Nico said slowly, working it out even as he said it, “is the same man who killed Cassiel.”
“Yes.”
“So none of this was random. Remy's debt, the contract, all of it, me ending up here.”
“Built to move you somewhere accessible.”
“Great.” His laugh had no humor in it at all. “That's great, Draco.”
“I am aware.”
“No, you're furious.” He took a step toward me, close enough now that I could feel the heat coming off him, his pulse raised under his skin from adrenaline that was not quite fear. “But that isn't all of it.”
I said nothing, because there was nothing safe to say.
His eyes held mine, steady in a way that made it difficult to look away first. “You're scared.”
The word landed harder than I expected it to.
“Nico.”