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The second shot blew out the light over my head.
Glass rained down my neck. Carson shoved me flat against the vault floor before I could even scream.
Pain hit a second later.
Hot. Wet. Deep.
“Fuck,” I gasped.
Carson’s hand clamped over my side. His fingers were already slick with blood.
“No. No, no, no.” His voice went rough in a way I hadn’t heard before. Not angry. Scared.
“I’m okay.”
“You are bleeding through my hand.”
“Then use a bigger hand.”
Another bullet punched into the stone wall above us.
Carson’s head snapped toward the sound. His pupils had gone thin and gold again. Not full beast. Not yet. But close enough that the sight of his teeth made my stomach twist.
“Stay down,” he said.
“Great plan. I was thinking about tap dancing.”
“Mia.”
That shut me up.
He said my name like it hurt.
The vault smelled like dust, old paper, gunpowder, and my blood. The black metal shelves around us held sealed boxes, dead files, old Council ledgers. The kind of stuff powerful people buried because burning it would look suspicious.
Jonah’s hoodie still lay ten feet away.
Blood on the sleeve.
One broken cuff hanging from the hood.
My little brother had been here.
And someone had dragged him out while we were busy playing target practice.
I pressed my teeth together and tried to sit up.
Carson shoved me back down with one arm.
“Don’t.”
“Jonah.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know where he is.”
“No. But if you bleed out on this floor, we won’t find him at all.”
His words were sharp. Mean, almost.
The panic behind them was worse.
The speaker above the vault door crackled.
Then a man laughed.
Low. Tired. Like he’d been carrying that laugh around for years and hated every second of it.
“You always did hate being told what to do, Miriam.”
Everything in me went still.
Not Mia.
Not kid.
Not sweetheart.
Miriam.
My real name.
The name my mother only used when I had a fever or a nightmare. The name nobody had called me since she died.
Carson froze over me.
The gold in his eyes burned brighter.
“Who is that?” he asked.
I couldn’t answer.
The speaker popped again.
“Miriam Elise Mercer.”
The vault lights flickered.
Every lock in the room clicked at once.
Not opened.
Recognized.
That was the problem with true names. They didn’t sound special to most people. Just words. A few syllables.
But when the right person said yours, the world listened.
The old brass lockboxes on the shelves rattled. The iron bars over the ventilation grates groaned. Even the dead keypad beside the vault door lit up green.
Carson looked down at me.
“What did he just do?”
My throat had closed up.
“He knows me.”
“No shit.”
“He knows my name.”
His jaw tightened.
Then the wall behind the old photo split down the middle.
A section of stone slid inward.
I stared at it.
Behind it was a narrow service tunnel. Concrete. Old cables. A line of yellow work lights running into darkness.
And a man standing at the end of it with a rifle in his hands.
He looked older than the photo.
Of course he did.
The photo had been taken before my mother disappeared. Before I started picking locks for cash. Before Jonah got good enough with computers to hack the city parking system just because he was bored.
But I knew that face.
I knew the hard mouth. The dark hair gone gray at the temples. The scar cutting through one eyebrow.
I had seen it in the mirror every day of my life.
My father lowered the rifle.
“Hi, Mia.”
I forgot how to breathe.
Carson moved in front of me.
Not all the way. He kept one hand locked over my wound. But his body blocked my view of the tunnel.
“Take one more step,” Carson said, “and I tear your throat out.”
My father looked him over.
His eyes paused on Carson’s bloodied shirt. The claw marks still healing along his ribs. The silver burn spreading under his skin.
Then Dad gave a small, humorless smile.
“Vale blood. Figures.”
Carson’s lip curled.
“Answer her.”
“No.” My voice came out thin.
Carson glanced down.
“What?”
“Move.”
“Mia—”
“Move.”
For one second, I thought he wouldn’t.
Then he shifted just enough for me to see past him.
My father was real.
Not a memory. Not a name in an old police file. Not some dead man I’d been trying not to hate since I was eight.
Real.
Breathing.
Holding the gun that had put a hole in me.
“You shot me,” I said.
He didn’t deny it.
“You were standing too close to the shelf.”
I blinked at him.
“What?”
“The shelf.” He nodded toward the row of black lockboxes behind me. “I needed you away from it.”
“You shot me to move me?”
“It grazed you.”
I laughed once.
It came out ugly.
Carson’s hand pressed harder against my side as blood slipped between his fingers.
“That does not look like a graze,” he said.
Dad’s eyes dropped to the wound.
For the first time, something cracked across his face.
Not enough. Not nearly enough.
But I saw it.
Regret.
Then it was gone.
“I didn’t have time,” he said.
“You had seventeen years.”
The tunnel went quiet.
Even Carson stopped breathing for a second.
Dad looked at me like he wanted to say something. Like he had a whole speech ready. Maybe he’d practiced it somewhere. Maybe he’d told himself I’d understand.
I hated him for that before he even opened his mouth.
“I kept you hidden,” he said.
“Oh, good. Wow. That clears it right up.”
“Mia—”
“No. Don’t call me that like you get to.” My hand shook when I pointed at the rifle. “You vanished. Mom died waiting for you to come through the damn door. Jonah barely remembers your face. And now you show up in a secret vault and put a bullet in me?”
“It wasn’t meant for you.”
“Then who was it meant for?”
His eyes slid toward Carson.
Carson made a low sound in his throat.
Not human.
Dad didn’t even flinch.
“That’s what I thought,” I said.
“He’s marked,” Dad said. “You don’t understand what the Council does with marked heirs.”
“I understand they tried to kill him.”
“You understand the part they let you see.”
“Then explain it.”
He didn’t.
Of course he didn’t.
Instead, Dad reached into his coat and pulled out a small black remote.
Carson’s head snapped up.
“Don’t.”
Dad pressed the button.
Metal shutters slammed down over the tunnel entrance.
Carson lunged anyway.
He moved so fast the air slapped against my face.
His claws tore through the first shutter, ripping deep lines into the steel.
A third shot rang out.
Carson jerked.
He stumbled sideways.
“Carson!”
The bullet hadn’t hit him.
It hit the floor at his feet.
Silver dust exploded upward in a dirty gray cloud.
Carson hit one knee, coughing hard. Smoke curled off his skin where the dust touched him.
Dad had known exactly what he was doing.
That made me colder than the blood loss.
“You bastard,” I whispered.
Dad looked through the narrowing gap in the shutters.
“I’m trying to keep you alive.”
“By kidnapping Jonah?”
His face changed again.
Tiny. Fast.
But there.
“You don’t know where Jonah is,” I said.
Dad said nothing.
“You don’t have him.”
“No.”
My heart kicked hard against my ribs.
“Then who does?”
“Sera moved him.”
Carson coughed into his fist. Blood dotted the floor.
Dad kept talking, fast now, like the shutting door had finally scared him into honesty.
“She wants the boy because he broke into the transit ledger. He found names he wasn’t supposed to find. Routes. Gate schedules. She thinks he copied the whole archive.”
“He did,” I said automatically.
Dad’s mouth twitched.
“Yeah. He probably did.”
That was so Jonah it almost made me smile.
Almost.
“Where did she take him?” I asked.
Dad looked at the rifle in his hands.
Then at me.
“Council territory.”
Carson dragged himself upright. His face had gone pale under the blood and silver burns.
“Which site?”
Dad ignored him.
“Listen to me, Mia. You need to leave the city.”
I stared at him.
“You think I’m leaving Jonah?”
“You can’t get him out if Sera knows what you are.”
“What I am?”
Dad’s eyes hit mine.
The vault lights buzzed.
My skin prickled.
He looked scared now. Really scared.
Not of Carson.
Of me.
“You hear names,” he said quietly. “That’s why she needs you alive.”
Carson turned toward me.
I hated that look on his face. Not fear exactly. More like a piece had clicked into place and he didn’t like the picture it made.
Dad went on.
“She’ll make you open the Moon Gate records. She’ll use you to call every bloodline hiding in this city.”
“You knew?” I asked.
He didn’t answer fast enough.
“You knew I could do this.”
“Mia—”
“You knew.”
“I knew enough to run.”
“You ran without us.”
“I ran so they wouldn’t find you.”
“They found us anyway.” My voice broke. I hated that it broke. “Mom died anyway. Jonah got taken anyway. So what exactly did you save?”
The shutters were almost closed now.
Just a strip of tunnel left.
Dad stood behind it, half his face hidden by metal shadow.
He looked like a stranger.
No. Worse.
He looked like someone who knew every reason I had to hate him and had decided to live with it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I laughed again.
“Don’t do that.”
“Mia.”
“Don’t you dare say sorry and walk away.”
His grip tightened on the rifle.
Then he said my true name one more time.
“Miriam Elise Mercer.”
The pain in my side flared white-hot.
I screamed.
Something inside the wound moved.
Not the bullet.
The blood around it.
Thin black lines crawled across my skin from the hole in my side. They formed a mark I knew without knowing how.
A lock.
A tiny, ugly lock made of blood.
Carson caught me before I could fold in half.
“What did he do?” he snarled.
Dad’s face went flat again. The old mask back in place.
“He gave her a key.”
“To what?” Carson demanded.
But the shutters slammed shut.
Dad was gone.
I threw myself toward the wall.
Carson caught me around the waist.
“No.”
“Let me go!”
“You can barely stand.”
“He’s right there.”
“He’s gone.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do.” His voice cracked across mine. “I care if you die chasing a man who just shot you.”
For a second, I fought him.
Not because I thought I could get through the steel. I just needed to hit something. Needed the room to stop spinning. Needed my father to come back and explain why he had looked at me like a stranger wearing his daughter’s face.
Then my legs gave out.
Carson lowered me carefully to the floor.
His hands were shaking.
That scared me more than the blood.
He ripped open the side of my shirt, then stopped.
The bullet wound was still bleeding, but slower now.
Black blood threaded around the torn skin in a neat circle.
Like the wound had stitched itself halfway closed.
Carson touched the mark with two fingers.
I sucked in a breath.
The bond between us snapped tight.
His pain hit me first.
Silver burning under his skin. His ribs screaming. The animal inside him pacing behind a locked door, furious and hungry.
Then something else.
A memory that wasn’t mine.
A black door underground.
Council guards in gray coats.
A vault number stamped into brass.
Nine.
Then eleven.
Then a string of numbers flashing through my head so fast I almost missed them.
Carson jerked his hand away.
“What?”
I pressed my palm over the wound.
The black lines shifted.
Not randomly.
They bent into shapes.
Digits.
“Your dad put a spell in the bullet,” Carson said.
“My dad put a map in me.”
The digits settled under my bloodied fingers.
8-1-4-0-6-2.
Below them, one word appeared in sharp black strokes.
MERCER.
Carson went very still.
“That’s not a map,” he said.
The vault door behind us unlocked with a heavy clunk.
I looked toward it.
Then back at the code burning in my skin.
“No,” I said. “It’s a vault code.”
Carson’s eyes narrowed.
“To where?”
I swallowed hard.
The answer came with the taste of metal in my mouth.
“Council territory.”
And somewhere behind the vault door, a phone started ringing.
Once.
Twice.
Then Jonah’s voice came through the old speaker system.
“Mia?”
I lunged for the door.
“Jonah!”
His breath hitched on the other end.
Then someone grabbed him away from the speaker.
The line went dead.
And the vault door began to open.