His Bite Stole My Tomorrow

The Photograph

Marlowe's key stuck in the lock, same as it always did, and she was still jiggling it loose when she noticed the lamp in her living room was already on.

She never left that lamp on.

She stood frozen in her own doorway for a full second, weighing the diner, the vanished informant, the unknown number, before pushing the door open the rest of the distance rather than running, because running from her own apartment felt like handing whoever was inside exactly the reaction they wanted.

Micah was sitting in her armchair like he'd been invited, coat still damp from rain she hadn't noticed falling outside, hands loose on the armrests, deliberately harmless in a posture that only partly succeeded. Nothing in the apartment looked disturbed. No forced lock, no broken window, no explanation at all for how a man had gotten past three deadbolts without leaving a mark on any of them.

"You broke into my apartment."

"I did." He didn't get up, didn't apologize, simply let the admission sit there. "I'd rather you were furious with me for that than dead because I waited outside for an invitation that might never have come."

"You could have called ahead. Left a note. Anything that didn't involve sitting in my chair in the dark."

"I considered it. I decided a locked door wasn't going to stop whoever sent that first message, and I'd rather be the uninvited presence in this room than let it be someone else's."

"How do you know where I live? I never gave you this address."

"Your firm's audit clearance included a personnel file. Building access requires it for insurance liability. I read it two nights ago, before you ever stepped into my elevator, because I wanted to know exactly who was coming to ask me about nineteen dead policyholders." He said it plainly, with no defensiveness in it. "I'm telling you that now because I'd rather you distrust me for something true than trust me on the assumption I'm less thorough than I actually am."

She should have been angrier than she was. She filed that fact away next to every other reaction of hers that had stopped behaving normally since Tuesday night.

"Elva texted me an hour ago," she said instead, setting her bag down slowly, keeping her hands busy so they wouldn't do anything else. "Not the unknown number. Her actual name, on my screen, like she'd always been saved there."

Something shifted behind his eyes, quick and unmistakable. "What did she say."

"That we should talk about you before I decide you're worth protecting."

"Then ask me whatever you need to decide it. I'd rather you hear it from me than from her."

"DeWitt Marsh is missing." She watched his face carefully as she said it, looking for the flicker of a man who already knew. She didn't find one, which either meant something or meant he was better at hiding things than she wanted to believe. "He warned me about a private trust called Aldergate, told me Elva founded it, and then two men walked into the diner where we were meeting and he vanished out the back before I could stop him."

"Aldergate." Micah said the name like it cost him something physical, a small wince he didn't bother hiding. "I haven't heard that name in almost forty years. I assumed it had died with the last of the people who ran it." He rubbed a hand along his jaw, the first genuinely unsettled gesture she'd seen from him since the elevator. "Finding out it's still active, and still efficient enough to move on you this fast, tells me I've been careless in ways I don't usually allow myself to be."

"It didn't die. And it apparently has enough reach to disconnect a phone number and swap out a building's security staff within twelve hours."

"That tracks with what Aldergate used to be, before I thought it was finished." He finally rose from the chair, crossing the room slowly enough that she had time to step back if she wanted to, and she found she didn't want to, which unsettled her more than his presence did. "It started as a research trust, decades ago, funded to study people like me. Elva helped find it after things ended between us."

"What ended between you."

"She's the only person before you I ever took a second time from." He said it without softening any part of it. "Not because I meant to. I nearly died once early in my time with her, and in the panic I took from her twice inside the same year, which tangled her existence to mine. She survived it. But it changed what she was, made parts of her existence dependent on mine in ways neither of us understood at the time, and she has spent every year since deciding that no one should ever be put in that position again without knowing the cost first. Aldergate exists because of what I did to her, not because of simple anger."

Marlowe absorbed that slowly, the shape of it landing heavier than she expected. "So she isn't hunting you out of jealousy."

"She's hunting me because she genuinely believes she's protecting the next person from becoming what she became. The uncomfortable part is that she isn't entirely wrong to think that."

"And I'm the next person."

"You're the only person in a hundred years I've come this close to doing it to again. One theft, tangled to me just as she was after her first. If I ever take from you a second time, you become exactly what she became, and I don't yet know what that would make either of us." He said it evenly, but something behind his composure had gone tight, careful, a man watching to see how much weight a fact could carry before it broke something. "I won't tell you it's nothing to worry about. I'd be lying, and you've had enough of that from other people this week already."

"What are you, actually?" She asked it again, the same question from two nights ago, except this time she wasn't asking out of shock. She was asking because Elva's whole existence apparently depended on the answer, and hers might soon too. "Not the theft. Not the rules around it. What you are, underneath all of it."

"You already have a guess. You've had it since the second night." His voice stayed low, careful. "I still won't be the one to say it first. But I will tell you this much plainly. Whatever word you're circling, it's close enough to correct that it's going to matter far more than either of us wants it to, very soon."