27. Jasmine
JASMINE
The next evening, I find the storage unit. It smells of cold cardboard and the inside of an old car. I keep the rolling door down to a hand's width — enough for a seam of light to travel through, but not high for anyone passing by to see me crouched between my father's boxes.
I peel tape from the nearest one. It comes away brittle, flaking dust over my knuckles. Inside: a winter coat that still holds the ghost of him, a chipped mug, a shoebox of photographs in sleeves gone milky with age.
I slide the first one free. My Dad at a desk, sleeves rolled, a cigarette burning unattended in a saucer, grinning at whoever held the camera. I have his mouth.
A folder waits under the photographs. Manila, the type he carried everywhere. The label reads CARTER — PERSONAL in his blocky text. The first sheet lists a bunch of names, and one stands out immediately.
Dain.
Underlined twice. In the margin, his scrawl: they don't age. 1953 society pages — same man, same ring, one hundred years on.
I swipe to the next and a photocopy of a building with marble columns has more names clipped off at the fold. His handwriting crowds the white. Vault below the floor. Meetings between men — not investors. Who books a bank at three in the morning?
Another sheet, newsprint glued crooked. A man dead, throat torn, ruled an animal attack. Mickey has circled the coroner and written: third this month. report sealed before the ink dries. somebody cleans up after them.
A folded note is tucked behind it, the crease worn. At the top, my father has written two words and circled them until the paper nearly tore. Human contacts.
Below that: There are people on our side of it. Go-betweens. Protected names. One agreed to meet. Didn't come. Didn't call again. They keep asking for the list. Do not give it to anyone until I know who is hunting them.
My hands won't stay steady. I press them flat to my thighs and make myself keep going.
A number is scratched out so hard the pen tore through — a contact, maybe. Someone who talked. Beside it, my father has written: If you're reading this and I'm gone, I wasn't careless. I kept the names out of his hands. One of them knows I'm watching.
I set the page down because I can't hold it and breathe together.
This is what killed him. Vampires. He walked straight at the thing Sebastian spent lifetimes burying, and he didn't look away.
I still don't know whether my father was chasing monsters, protecting people from them, or standing too close to something that swallowed him whole.
I go to keep looking, and suddenly, a sound bangs, metal on metal further down the row. I hold my breathing and listen. Two voices echo.
"Which number?"
"No idea. We check them all."
A door screams up on its track. Then another.
"He said the folder, not the boxes. Folder first."
"And if she's inside?"
"No harm to her. He gets her. If the folder isn't here, we burn the rest. He wants nothing left."
Door after door slides up and I fold myself behind the tallest stack easing the folder under my coat, flat to my stomach, arms crossed over it like I'm cold.
The snap of a hasp two units down makes my pulse climb into my teeth. I've nowhere to go, there's one way in, and one way out.
The unit beside mine is empty; the door stood open when I came. I stare at that narrow dark gap as if my body might become brave enough to cross it. It doesn't.
I sink lower until my knees press into the concrete and the corner of a frame digs into my back. Dust coats my tongue. I seal my lips because even air feels noisy in here. The cutters snap again.
I try to make myself smaller. It is a stupid instinct, childish almost, but my body does it anyway.
Shoulders in. Chin down. I am thirty-one years old, and I have survived boardrooms, betrayal, monsters at windows, and the kind of love that can swallow a woman whole.
Yet here I am, reduced to breath and bone, praying they will mistake me for another forgotten thing. My knees begin to ache.
I nearly slap the tape dangling down and hitting my face, but I know that sound would lead them to me. Instead, I watch it tremble, ridiculous and ordinary, while men are outside looking for the thing I hold.
Sebastian's name rises in me so hard it almost becomes sound.
I bite it back. He would tear the door off its track, rip these men apart, and make the whole world pay for scaring me.
The thought should comfort me. It doesn't. It breaks something tender instead, because I understand now that his fear was not invented.
It was warped, yes. Possessive. Damaging.
But not false. He saw the teeth before I did. And still, I cannot call him.
"Empty."
"Next."
Their footsteps move closer, gritty and patient. They aren't rushing. These men have been told there is no need.
The ache for Sebastian rises again. I used to think he was the reason I was in this world of his, and loving him had put a mark on my back.
Now the shape changes. My father was already inside this.
My family was already a name someone watched.
Sebastian did not bring me to it. That does not make what he did right. It makes it harder to hate.
A flashlight beam cuts under my door and slides over the floor. It touches the toe of my boot. I pull my foot back so fast a box shifts. The sound is tiny. To me, it is thunder. The footsteps stop.
"What was that?"
I clamp one hand over my mouth.
Another voice, closer. "This one."
The handle rattles.
My whole body folds in on itself. I am no longer the woman walking into war on her own feet. I am a daughter in a storage unit, crouched behind cardboard, holding the last proof of her father's life while monsters decide which one I'm in.
I press myself into the corner until there is nowhere left to go. I don't think of running or Sebastian. I think of my Dad's note that he wasn't careless. I realize then, with a coldness that empties me out, that my father had known what it felt like to be found.