16. Nico
NICO
The fire I made has burned down to embers, and I have not moved in an hour.
Riley sleeps against my chest, one bruised arm thrown across me like she's claiming territory even unconscious.
I track the slow drum of her heart, each beat confirming she's alive.
But it also confirms something worse—that I have lost myself in her.
Her scent has changed. Warmer now. Mine threaded through it. The animal part of me, I've kept leashed since Italy, wants to purr at that. I don't let it.
Against the wood, the relic stirs. I feel the ice before I see it—a draft with no source, curling off the artifact and reaching for her.
The firelight bends, smearing long and thin like the room can't decide on its own dimensions.
A faint line surfaces across its surface.
A new thread of the map, glowing dull, then gone. Reaching for her. Always her.
Riley wakes. "You're staring."
"You twitched."
"I always twitch." She sits up, pulling the blanket with her, and I miss the warmth immediately, which is my own problem. She notices the glow from the relic. "It did it again?"
"Yep."
"Cozy." She rubs her arms. "So we're not staying."
A call shivers against the floorboards—the cheap one Bastian was given a number for, in another life, when this was a job and not whatever it has become. I answer on the second ring.
"You're alive." Bastian's voice is pitched high, frayed at the edges. Wherever he's calling from, he's whispering. "You've still got it."
"Why do you care, Graves."
"Because I'm a dead man, that's why." A wet swallow. "The Prague job. The buyer. It was never a buyer. The client routing went through a cutout, and I just found out it goes straight into Lucien's people. I set you up, Serrano. I'm—"
"You never know. That's how you sleep at night."
"They used my network like a faucet." His breath rattles.
"Casimir's ledgers got cracked when you put him on his back.
Everything he bought, everyone he sold to, it's all in the open now, and Lucien's been buying.
He's got a piece. One of the fragments. Came through the same rot I came through.
I'm telling you because if I'm going down, I want one person to know it wasn't on purpose. "
Riley is watching my face, reading it the way she reads a lock.
"Stay off the grid. If you can."
"There's no grid left for me." The line dies.
I lower the phone, and it lights again. Cassandra. Text, not voice—she only writes when it's bad.
Confirmed. Lucien holds one fragment. He's presenting it to the conclave as proof the vault should be opened. Turning it political. He's gaining names. It's now a campaign.
A third message stacks under it before I've finished the second. Gabriel.
I know what you're already thinking. Don't. You cannot fix this by putting her in a box. She's not cargo. Don't lose her like an asset.
He always did know me too well.
"Okay." Riley has her boots half-laced. "Your face just did six terrible things. Talk."
"Lucien has one of the fragments."
She goes very still. "How."
"Casimir's records. The broker chain that sent you into Prague. The same hands that touched the obsidian touched everything else. We just couldn't see it." I stand. "Which means he can move openly now, and you can't."
"Excuse me."
"There's a place in the Dolomites. Old. I leave you there, I run the rest of this down, and you don't end up on a list of deaths by Lucien." It comes out clean and reasonable, but absolutely the wrong thing to say.
She rises slowly. "Say that again. The part where you turn me into luggage."
"To keep you breathing."
"No." Just the one word, sharp enough to cut glass. "Don't you call a cage protection again."
The words land somewhere I can't armor. Years of solving danger by moving fragile things away.
"You'd be safe," I say.
"I'd be blind. And waiting. And I've done waiting."
She laughs without humor. "I'm in this with you."
"Why?" I need to hear it. Not the bond's reason. Hers.
She drags a hand through her hair. "Because I unlocked it.
Because every time you put me somewhere safe, Lucien gets one more room to move in.
And because—" she grimaces, "—if he wins, ordinary people die not knowing why.
My people. The ones who still think monsters are bedtime threats.
I'm not brave, Nico. I'm done letting powerful men draw maps with me folded off the edge. "
It is not a speech. It is too stubborn and too tired to be one. That's how I know it's true. I make myself say it. "Fine. But you follow my lead."
Something crosses her face—surprise, maybe, that I yielded. She covers it fast.
"No," I say, before she can sharpen herself around the word. "That came out wrong."
Her brows lift. "Did the great Black Fang just correct himself?"
"Don't make me regret it." I pick up the relic and hold it out to her. "We move together. I handle what tries to kill us. You handle what this thing wants."
She takes it, and the map wakes under her palm, a thin line burning west across the dark.
Not Europe this time. Farther. Across water.
Not tonight, then. Not even cleanly tomorrow.
Across water means papers, routes, bribes, and travel that leaves a person feeling smuggled even when they walk through the front door.
"Together," she says.
It should terrify me how easily I believe her.
"Together," I answer.