24. Nico
NICO
Riley has the notebook flayed open under the lamp, the back board peeled in two with the tip of a kitchen knife, and she's halfway through a sentence about her father's parentage that would make Gabriel proud.
"He tucked it in the spine," she mutters, dragging her thumbnail downward. "Of course he did. God forbid my father leave one honest thing where a normal grieving daughter could find it."
The obsidian stays bundled, wrapped tight, and even muffled in cloth it pulls the warmth out of the room a degree at a time. I keep the burner close, Cassandra's line open and low.
"Then don't treat it like a family argument," Cass says, dry as old vellum. "If your father used that mark properly, it's a dead record. Built to open once, then ruin the trail behind it. No second pass. No generous replay."
"How fragile is once?"
"Fragile enough that I'd prefer no one stab it out of spite." A pause, paper shifting at her end. "And before either of you asks, no, that mark doesn't prove who trained him. It proves someone with keeper access trusted him with a protocol most humans were never meant to see."
"Say the rest, Cass." I demand.
"Opening it may throw a signature. Brief, but old records were designed to be witnessed. If Lucien knows what to listen for, you'll light the hillside for him. So open it clean, then leave."
Riley sits back. Beneath the peeled board, set into the spine, is a slim glass cylinder capped in dull metal, and over the cap, a disc of brittle wax pressed with the same twinned spiral. The wax stops me where her father's handwriting never could.
"That's not his," I say. "That's ours. Keeper's wax. He didn't just hide something. He closed it the way my kind close a thing meant to die after it speaks."
"Right." She lifts the obsidian free of its wrapping, and the blue chill off it climbs my forearms. "Your seal, my count. This as the key. Let's wake my dead father and have a chat."
We work it in tandem. I lift the wax along the seam Cassandra named while Riley turns the cap through the sequence — three, two, one, then the deliberate quarter-turn that looks like a fumble and isn't. When she brings the relic flush to the glass, it flares hard and silver frosts up to my elbows.
The cylinder hums. A voice climbs out of it, frayed thin, scraped down to almost nothing.
"Riley." A breath dragged over a tired chest. "If you're hearing me, I lost a bet I made with myself, and you found the spiral. Naturally. I'd be livid that you're this good, if I weren't the one who designed it for you."
Her body locks, I shift a half-step in just in case she needs to lean on me.
"There's a vault, kid. Real. Old. Buried by people who only look like people.
It was never treasure. What sits in it could turn their world over and ours with it — proof of what they are, and worse, proof of the lies they've told each other for centuries.
Sealed, it's history. In Lucien Moreau's hands it becomes a blade, and he'll only ever show the world where it cut. Never the stitching underneath."
"Then you bury it," Riley tells the recording, her voice cracking down the middle. "You expect me to sort your mess."
The dead can't hear. He keeps on, gentle and pitiless both.
"You weren't an accident, sweetheart. I'm sorry.
I won't lie — that'd be the worst thing I ever did you, I only kept it quiet.
I laid the road. The debt. The broker. The relic surfacing close to a thief nobody powerful would think to fear.
I taught you locks and patience and how to spot the planted mistake because someday the world might rest on a person no king ever bothered to watch.
I begged whatever's listening that it wouldn't be you.
But if Lucien moved, you'd be in the open whether I warned you or not.
So I chose the version where you had a chance.
By now, you already know what these people are.
Vampires. Some can be trusted, others you can't, and Lucien you can't."
A crackle eats half a breath. Then, smaller: "West, Riley. Past where the roads stop pretending to be roads. An old blood cathedral, now buried — keeper ground beneath a dead mission, deep wilderness. That's the door. I trust you to find the rest, refuse the obvious answer. I will always love you."
The hum splinters. The glass dims, the etched lines folding into dark. Once, exactly as promised. Riley is frozen to the core.
"He engineered me. Like— Every game, every wrong detail, every rule hidden inside a mess. He made my head the lockpick and called it raising me." Her gaze comes up, raw and direct.
"I won't say he was right." I keep my hands at my sides where she can see them. "He used you."
"Lucien." Cassandra breaks through. "There's movement where he is."
She drags the heel of her hand across her face, once, brutal, and stands.
"He knows. We must beat him there. My father turned me into a key. I'm finished being one for anybody but me. We move. Now."
"Cass, route us west. Gabriel, papers and wheels at the line." I shout.
"Already mobilizing on our end," Cass says. "And Nico — his money started moving twenty minutes ago. He felt the match strike."
Outside, the cold has teeth, and far to the west an old monster has turned his face toward the same dark we're about to drive into.