His Bite Stole My Tomorrow

Thirty Minutes

The message that followed the photograph arrived thirty seconds later, as if whoever sent it wanted to be sure the image had landed first.

Bring the audit files and the actuary. Come alone. We'll tell you where once you're both in the car.

Marlowe read it twice, then held the phone out so Micah could read it himself, her hand steadier than she expected given what her chest was doing.

"They want me too."

She read the message a third time, as if repetition might soften what it actually meant. Come alone. Bring the audit files and the actuary. Whoever had written it understood exactly how to make two demands sound like one small request, and exactly how much fear a single missing word, please, could imply by its absence.

"They want leverage over both of us at once, which tells me something useful." Micah studied the message like it was a puzzle rather than a threat, his voice level in a way she was starting to recognize as his version of controlling fear rather than lacking it. "Aldergate has spent decades collecting theory about what I am. They don't have field data on what happens when a tangled pair is separated under pressure. Taking us both together means they finally get to test it."

"Test it how."

"I don't know. That's what worries me." He set the phone down carefully, as if it might go off in his hand. "What I do know is that walking in there together plays directly into whatever they're hoping to learn, and walking in there apart leaves Marsh alone with people who've already proven they don't mind hurting someone to make a point."

Marlowe pressed her palms against the kitchen counter, steadying herself the same way she used to steady herself before difficult meetings, except no meeting she'd ever walked into carried odds like this one. "Then we need a third option. Something that isn't walking in blind and isn't leaving him there."

"There's one thing I have that Aldergate doesn't know about." Micah's jaw tightened, some private cost moving behind his expression before he said the rest. "Elva knows what I am completely. She doesn't know everything about the trust's current operation, because she stepped back from running it years ago, handing it to people more comfortable with the parts of this work she'd stopped being willing to do. If we can reach her directly, separately from whoever's holding Marsh, she might tell us where they'd actually take him."

"You think she'd help us."

"I think she still remembers what it felt like to be afraid of what I am before she understood any of it, and I think somewhere underneath the crusade, she never actually wanted an innocent bystander pulled into this, someone like Marsh, though I could be wrong about that." He didn't sound certain. He sounded like a man betting on a version of someone he used to know, rather than the version currently sending anonymous threats through her phone. "It's a risk. But it's better than walking into a car with no information at all."

Marlowe pulled up the message thread again, staring at the number that had first quoted words spoken inside a soundproofed penthouse. "If Elva already reached out to me directly, maybe I don't need you to find her. Maybe I answer her myself, tell her I want to talk, and see if she actually shows up."

"That's dangerous in a different way. If she agrees to meet you alone, you're walking into a room with the one person who's spent decades studying exactly how to hurt someone like me through someone like you."

"I've been an actuary for six years. I know how to sit across from someone dangerous and ask questions calmly. I did it two nights ago in your penthouse, and I'm still standing in my own kitchen instead of anywhere worse." She met his eyes, steady despite the tremor she could feel just beneath her ribs. "You said it yourself. She might not want anyone innocent caught in this. Let me find out if that's still true, while you use whatever hundred-year instincts you have to figure out where they'd actually be holding Marsh."

Micah was quiet long enough that she wondered if he'd refuse outright, forbid her from going with the same reflexive authority overprotective men always seemed to assume they had, and some old resistant part of her had already prepared an argument for that possibility.

He didn't refuse.

"If you do this," he said instead, "you tell me where, and you give me thirty minutes before you walk in. If I don't hear from you by the end of them, I'm coming in regardless of what it costs either of us."

"That's fair."

"It isn't fair. It's the only version of this I can live with." He said it quietly, the words costing him something he didn't try to hide. "I've spent a hundred years learning to survive things by staying still and waiting them out. I don't know how to do that with you in the room I'm waiting outside of."

He reached out, slow enough that she had every chance to step back, and settled his hand briefly over hers on the counter, warm despite everything she knew about what he was underneath that warmth.

She typed the reply with her free hand, her other hand still under his, something in the contact settling a fear she hadn't fully admitted to having until his touch quieted it.

I'll meet you. Somewhere public. Tell me where and when.

She set the phone down and looked up to find Micah watching her with an expression she hadn't seen from him before, something closer to fear than caution, though he'd have denied it if she'd named it out loud.

"If this goes wrong," he said, "I need you to know that walking away from this apartment tonight was already the bravest thing anyone's done around me in longer than I can remember."

The reply came back almost instantly, faster than any message Aldergate itself had sent, as though Elva had been waiting with her thumb already over the screen.

The observatory rooftop. Tonight. Come alone, or don't come at all, and I promise you'll regret which choice you made.