22. Nico
NICO
The door cascades off the wall, and I'm through the gap before the iron finishes falling.
Immediately, I smell blood that belongs to her.
Riley is chained by both wrists, upright, furious, a split across her lip and a gash above one brow.
Her head comes up when she sees me. The thing I've kept leashed strains hard against the hold.
Lucien stands a single pace from her, one pale hand resting on the back of her as though he's already measuring the room for ownership.
"Serrano," he says. "Prompt, as ever."
I answer him with the two men between us instead of words.
The first I take before his weapon clears leather — a hand at his throat, the wall providing the rest. The second fires.
The round buries in the wall because I'm no longer standing where he aimed.
I respect the bullets enough not to be hit because I know they're wooden.
Gabriel comes through the side entrance like he holds the deed to it, fast and grinning and entirely lethal, cutting two mercenaries off Riley's flank. "Right's yours," he calls. "I've got the exits."
Cassandra's voice arrives clean and level in my ear.
"Nico, the suppression field is still live.
There's a clamp on a tripod by the altar — that's your dampener, the thing that killed the relic.
It isn't only smothering the stone. It's reading it.
They're pushing the signal out in bursts.
Whatever it pulled off the obsidian while she was close, copies are already leaving the building. "
"How long?"
"Seconds. Break the clamp."
I move toward the altar, and Lucien reads the shift before anyone else does.
Not fear. Calculation. He is over nine hundred years old and too disciplined to mistake a rescue for a battlefield worth winning.
His gaze flicks to Riley, to the shattered dampener, to the black case already disappearing through the low priest's door behind the altar.
He has what he came for. That is the only reason he steps back. He picks up a barrel, and swings it toward Riley, building a choice for me. Lucien or Riley. I choose Riley, and get there before it takes her out.
"Nico—" Her voice, raw and sharp. "Side door, the box is hot, kill the box—" and then she isn't talking, she's moving, because one of her cuffs is already open.
A pick. She's had a pick the whole time, worked the pin loose.
She wrenches free, twists, and drives her heel into the nearest candle stand.
It topples across the cable run, scattering flame and shadow, and half the chapel drops into a chaos that suits me far better than it suits them.
I reach the clamp. It's exactly what Cassandra described — squat, matte, a small green light pulsing on its face like it's pleased with itself. I bring my fist down through it. The casing folds, the light dies, and the gray hiss cuts to a silence so total I can hear Riley breathing.
A seam of pale light crawls the obsidian and lays one broken mark across the ash on the floor. The stone is awake again, and the timing of it frustrates me. It just gave its next clue to a machine before I could smash it.
"They got it," I say. "The reading. Before I—"
"I know." Grim, now. "It transmitted. He has a fragment of the resonance. Not enough though. Only to chase it."
Across the room, Lucien pauses in the priest's door. He looks at Riley, then at me with my body planted in front of her, and something close to satisfaction moves over his face. He learned what he came to learn tonight, and it was never only the stone.
A woman steps past him toward the same exit — Sabine, pragmatic to the last, a hard set to her mouth that says she likes none of this, the obsession least of all. She doesn't draw on me. She takes the door, and her payment, and her doubts, and she's gone.
Every instinct I own howls to chase, to end this poison in this scraped-out room. But I need to get Riley to safety.
"Out," Gabriel says, hauling a table aside. "Now, both of you. I am not carrying two corpses out of a church. Terrible for my reputation."
I reach Riley, and her hands are shaking while raking the tables for whatever Lucien stripped before he ran. "He took something off the box," she says. "I watched one of them pull a card—"
"Ok."
"Then we chase—"
"We move." I get an arm around her as though she's made of the one thing I'm most afraid to drop.
We come out into cold air and tree-dark as the chapel takes fire behind us, the stripped saints lit at last by something that isn't reverence.
Gabriel folds us into the car. I don't remember the woods between.
I remember her pulse under my hand and the effort it takes not to clutch it like a man holding a door shut against the sea.
In the back seat she finally turns to me. "You had him," she says quietly. "Clean line. I watched you not take it."
"I had you," I say.
Cassandra comes back once more, softer than I have ever heard her. "He's clear of the valley. Nico — he left with enough. He'll move on the next stage before you guys."
Riley's fingers turn under mine and hold on.
She is bleeding and shaking and alive against me, and the night should feel like a win.
It doesn't. Because Lucien walked out of that church having learned the one thing I would have died to keep from him — not where the trail leads next, but exactly where to set the knife.