Page 26 of Fated to the Fang

Greer has made the drawer irritatingly competent for a human office: deadbolt, fireproof lockbox, tamper strip across the runner, and a key he keeps on his ring. I do not use the key. I press two fingers to the pins, listen for the metal’s memory, and open it without breaking the seal. Greer is cautious. He simply did not build the lock for something that can hear tumblers think. Inside, I find the coast folded into paper.

Wrackmouth. Cobb's Landing. Gull Reach. Two smaller harbors marked only by county code. Missing-hours reports. Seasonal worker notices. Strandings Avery would have cataloged in a different grant. Seals drained and left whole. A porpoise pod at Wrackmouth with paired punctures no marine office wanted to name. Three deckhands from separate towns who missed the last bus home and never reached another.

Behind those, fuel records tied to Saltline Charters boats. Not public charters. Private fuel. Night runs logged against boats with no passengers. Tide codes instead of route names. Payments routed through accounts that should have been dead before Greer was born. And in the margin of one copied page, pressed hard enough to scar the paper: a broken ring crossed by three strokes.

Not Crimson Harbor's mark. A route mark. The floorboard outside the office complains. I close the drawer as Greer steps in with one hand already on the butt of his sidearm.

"You have no business in here," he says.

"No."

His eyes flick to the desk. He knows what I opened. Worse, he knows why.

"You kept this from her."

"Yes, and everyone else. You think I don't know what those reports look like stacked together? You think I wanted that woman walking into it with a camera and a grant badge?"

"She is already in it."

"Because people like you keep leaving tunnels under towns and calling the rest of us reckless for finding the stairs."

There is more in him than fear. Anger. Duty. A human's bitter little courage, braced against a world that has never trusted him. I should leave him with it. I don't. I am across the room before his hand clears the holster. Two fingers to his wrist. Not his temple. Not his mind taken by force and gutted clean. A lighter touch. A shameful one, still.

"Paperwork," I say softly.

His pupils widen. The Touch takes the last minutes and folds them under a calm surface. Not gone. Buried. He will remember coming in before dawn because sleep would not hold. He will remember checking the drawer and finding it locked. The echo hits me as I let him go.

Greer's office from his side of the desk. A boy's photograph pinned inside the drawer. A mother crying in a county hallway. Jasper's voice saying boys don't walk off the water for nothing. Greer signing reports he hates because the truth has no box on the form. I step back, and he blinks.

"Valek?" he says, confused now, irritated without knowing why.

"You look tired, Sheriff."

"So do you." He rubs his wrist, frowning at the skin. "What are you doing here?"

"Looking for you."

"Well, you found me." He glances at the locked drawer and away again. "Office hours start at eight."

I leave before the buried thing can stir.

Celeste waits in the alley behind the municipal building.

"You touched him," she says.

I keep walking. "Lightly."

"That is a word men use when they want the sin to sound smaller."

"He nearly caught me."

"He is human law in Crimson Harbor, not a loose end."

I stop then. The anger in me has nowhere clean to go. "Human law has six harbors in a locked drawer and Avery walking blind through the seventh."

"And now Greer has a buried memory with your handprint on it. If Helena finds that echo, she will not call it protection. She will call it proof that Avery has made you reckless."

"She would be right."