He’s A 10 But… He Bites

1. Riley

RILEY

The envelope is the kind they make heavy on purpose.

Cream-colored, embossed with a law firm's name across the top like that's something to brag about.

I turn it over twice on my kitchen counter before I open it, because some small, dumb part of me still believes a thing isn't true until I read it.

My father knew better. He used to say a problem you won't look at just grows teeth in the dark. So I look.

Final Notice of Intent to Pursue Legal Action.

Then a number with too many zeros, a number that belonged to him and somehow became mine the day they lowered him into the ground.

Funeral costs. A second mortgage I never knew existed.

Loans signed in a careful, looping hand I'd recognize anywhere — the same hand that filled the margins of every book in our apartment with notes nobody else could read.

I set the letter down. My coffee's gone cold.

The radiator clanks like it's laughing at me.

"Thanks, Dad," I mutter to the empty room. "Real generous of you."

Grief is a funny thing. Eight months in, and it still ambushes me from the cheap seats — a smell, a song, a stranger's laugh in a crosswalk. But this is the version I've gotten used to. The kind that comes itemized, with a due date.

My phone buzzes against the counter. Unknown number. I almost let it ring out. Then I don't, because broke people can't afford to be choosy.

"Riley Harrow." A man's voice, smooth as oil on water. "You're a hard woman to reach."

"That's the idea. Who's this?"

"A friend of a friend. The kind with an opportunity." A pause, deliberate, theatrical. "And I hear you could use one."

He insists on meeting in person, which tells me he's either careful or paranoid, and in my experience those are the same animal wearing different coats. We land on a wine bar with bad lighting and worse prices, the type of place where nobody looks twice and everybody's pretending not to listen.

Bastian Graves is already there when I arrive, tucked into the corner booth with the best view of the door.

Smart. Weathered face, graying at the temples, lean in a way that suggests he's outrun a few people in his time.

He's got sharp green eyes that move over me like an appraiser pricing a vase — quick, thorough, settling somewhere just shy of impressed.

"Riley." He says it like we're old friends. "Sit. You look like you've had a week."

"I've had a year." I slide in across from him and don't touch the glass already poured for me. "Skip the warm-up. What's the job?"

He smiles, all teeth and no warmth. "Direct. I appreciate that." He slides a phone across the table. On the screen: a photograph of an object resting on black velvet.

It's a relic. Obsidian, maybe — that deep volcanic black that drinks the light instead of reflecting it.

Carved into a shape my eyes can't quite hold, all hard angles softened by tiny etched markings that crawl across its surface in rows.

Old. Older than old. Something about the way the lines repeat reminds me of a thing I shouldn't be thinking about right now, so I don't.

"Pretty," I say. "What is it?"

"That," Bastian says, "is not your concern. What's your concern is that it goes up for private auction in Prague in nine days, and a certain bidder is very, very keen to walk away with it." He leans in. "My client would prefer that didn't happen."

"So outbid them."

"My client doesn't bid." He says it lightly, but there's a stone underneath. "My client acquires."

I push the phone back. "So you don't want a buyer, you want a thief. Why me?"

"Because you're good. The best, by certain whispered accounts. And because—" he taps the table twice "—you're motivated."

That lands closer than I'd like. "How much?"

"1 million dollars."

I keep my face flat, which takes everything I've got, because the number doesn't just clear my debt. It buries it and dances on the grave.

"That's a lot of money for an overpriced paperweight," I say. "What's the catch?"

"No catch. A timeline and a temperament.

" He spreads his hands. "The buyer it's meant for is patient and rich and very specific.

Their instructions came sealed." He produces a folded card from his jacket and sets it between us without quite letting go of it.

There's a smear of dark red wax on the flap, pressed with a sigil I don't recognize — a single vertical line crossed by three short strokes.

Beneath it, in ink the color of dried blood, three words: The First Voice.

"That a name?" I ask.

"A title." Bastian tucks the card away before I can study it. "And one you'll never need to use, if you're smart. You take the relic, you hand it to me, you get paid, you forget you ever heard the phrase."

"You're not telling me everything."

"I'm telling you what you'll be paid to know." He spreads that oily smile again. "Which is the most anyone in my line of work ever gets."

Every instinct I have is standing up and pointing at the door. The money's too clean. The client's too hidden. The thing on that velvet looked back at me through a photograph.

"I'll think about it," I lie.

"There's a preview," Bastian says, like he didn't hear me. "Collectors only, by invitation. I took the liberty." He slides a second card across — an invitation, this time, real and crisp, made out to a Ms. Vivian Cole. "Go look at it. Then tell me no."

Ms. Vivian Cole wears a charcoal dress, low heels she can run in if she has to, and the bored expression of a woman who has seen better than this. I am Ms. Vivian Cole for exactly one evening, and she is very good at her job.

The preview's held in a private gallery off a cobbled square, all marble and hush.

I'm through the door thirty seconds before the rest of me catches up, because my eyes are already working.

Two exits I can see — the front, and a service door behind a velvet rope, half-hidden by a potted fig.

Cameras in the corners, four of them, the dome kind, with a blind wedge to the left of the staircase where their fields don't overlap.

Two guards on the floor pretending to be guests, earpieces betraying them, plus one I'd bet money on stationed up the stairs.

Staff moving champagne in lazy circles, clockwise, every six minutes.

I clock all of it the way other people clock the weather.

My father taught me to read a room before I learned to read a clock.

Find the way out first, he'd say, then you can relax enough to enjoy the party.

I never did learn the relaxing part. The relic sits alone in a case at the room's far end, lit from below so the shadows fall up and wrong.

Up close it's worse and better both. The etched markings I saw in the photo aren't decoration — they're a pattern, repeating and shifting, the kind of puzzle my dad used to scratch onto napkins to keep me quiet in restaurants.

Find the rule, Riley. Everything's got a rule if you stare long enough.

My fingers twitch toward the glass before I catch them.

The thing isn't beautiful, exactly. It's certain.

Like it already knows how this ends and is just waiting for the rest of us to figure it out.

"Remarkable, isn't it." The voice comes from my left, refined, unhurried.

I turn. A man stands a polite distance off, studying the case — tall, elegant, dressed in a suit that costs more than my apartment building.

Dark blond hair swept back, pale skin, the still composure of someone who's never once been in a hurry.

He doesn't look at me. He looks at the relic like it owes him money.

"It's something," I agree, in Vivian's bored alto.

"It's the only thing in this room worth the trip." A faint smile. Then he mingles into the crowd, leaving cold air where he stood. A waiter murmurs Mr. Armand as he passes, and I've heard the name before, Casimir is the first name. I file it away in the back of my skull for safe keeping.

There are others watching it too. A woman by the stairs who hasn't touched her drink. A heavyset man near the front who keeps checking his watch and the case in the same glance. Nobody at this preview is here for the Etruscan pottery.

I stand in front of that black, knowing object, with three sets of expensive eyes pretending not to want it, a sealed title burning a hole in my memory, and a number that could give me back my life.

Outside, in the darkness of the square, I call Bastian.

"Well?" he says.

I think about the letter on my counter. The looping handwriting. The teeth in the shadows.

"I'm in," I tell him. "But I want half up front."