9. Chapter 9
Serenity
I’m on my feet before the boots reach my cell. Blanket folded, hair tied back off my neck, standing at the door like a woman with somewhere to be.
I tied my hair back an hour ago. I did it without deciding to, and I’ve been not thinking about it ever since.
It saves time. That’s all it is.
The supervisor came at noon and took me down to the same shower stalls as before. Hot water, soap, a comb. Now I’m in a pale blue shift that stops at my knees, waiting at a locked door for the sound of boots.
He’s two days late. I expected him the night before last, then last night, and both nights I lay on my cot listening for footsteps that never came. Today I haven’t been able to sit down at all.
It’s a trick. Just a trick.
Whatever he did to me that night is not something I chose, and it’s not something about me. It’s how a patient hunter softens a thing to sweeten the blood.
Knowing that is supposed to help.
It doesn’t.
The lock turns. “Hands,” the guard says, and runs the scanner over my tag. Then we walk. Concrete, then carpet. The bleach thins, the candle smell comes up to meet me, and my feet quicken on the soft floor until I slow them on purpose.
The guard swipes the door and jerks his chin. He doesn’t come in. His footsteps fade down the hall until they’re gone. Whatever happens in this room, nobody watches. Nobody listens. I don’t want to think about that.
I step through, and the room is the same. He isn’t.
The fire has burned low. Nobody’s fed it.
The decanter sits untouched, the glass upside down beside it.
He’s standing at the mantel in a dark coat, and the coat is damp across the shoulders.
Mud has dried gray on his shoes and up onto the hem of his trousers.
His hair is wrong, pushed back with a hand instead of a comb.
He looks like a man who came here from somewhere without stopping.
I’ve seen him only one way. Perfect. Pressed. Now I stand inside the door and look, and for once he’s the one being looked at.
“You’re late,” I say, before I’ve decided to say anything.
“I’m aware.” He doesn’t explain. He doesn’t take the coat off either.
I cross the room and take the handkerchief out of my waistband and hold it out at arm’s length. A white square, folded small, gone soft from three nights under my mattress. I could have dropped it in the ward toilet. I didn’t.
“Yours.”
He looks at it longer than a piece of cloth deserves.
“You kept it,” he says.
“There’s no laundry service in a cage. Take it or don’t.”
He takes it and sets it by the decanter without looking away from me. “Sit, Serenity.”
“Don’t.” I shake my head. “Don’t call me that.”
“It’s your name.”
“Not from you.” The words come out level. My pulse doesn’t. “You people took everything else. The name stays mine until I choose to give it. There’s a difference.”
He studies me. The fire moves. He doesn’t.
“Then sit,” he says. No name.
“I’ll stand.”
“Your knees disagreed last time.”
“Last time I hadn’t had a real meal in longer than I want to think about.” I put my hands behind my back and set my feet. “That’s changed. I’m guessing I have you to thank for the extra rations. So, thanks. I’ll stand.”
He inclines his head a fraction.
Then he comes to me.
Quiet on the carpet, and he stops close enough that the cold reaches me. Real cold, laid over the smell of rain and road. My wolf feels it too. She stays calm. She stays awake.
Standing, he has almost a foot on me. I make myself hold his eyes all the way up. Violet, dark at the rim, and something in them tonight that wasn’t there before. Hungrier. Two days hungrier, maybe. I swallow hard.
Two cool fingers touch my jaw and turn my head aside. Not forcing. Just moving me exactly where he wants me. My hair is already out of his way. I did that for him an hour ago, and the shame of it arrives now, right on time.
Bad idea, dammit. .
I force my eyes open. I’m not going to squeeze them shut this time.
I won’t let him see that he scares me. So I watch—the dark hair falling forward, the lashes coming down, the patient tilt of his head.
No breath touches my skin. A man’s mouth this close means warm air.
There’s none. Cool lips find my pulse, and my heart slams against them, telling him everything my face won’t.
I stiffen. His teeth press. Pain, sharp, the same as before.
Then the flood.
It comes up from the bite fast and hot, everywhere at once, and standing, I learn what the chair was for.
The chair was mercy. Now, there’s my own knees under me, and that’s all.
The first pull is deeper than any he’s taken before, deep enough that my vision jumps, and I feel him catch himself—a hitch, a beat where his mouth stops working—and then the rhythm comes back slower.
Slower on purpose. He’s managing himself against my neck, and knowing that should frighten me more than it does.
The second pull rolls heat down through my chest into my belly. The third sends it lower, heavy, and my thighs press together against an ache that’s already unbearable. The floor tilts. I lock my knees, hard, bracing the only way I have left.
Trick. It’s a trick. He’s doing this to—
He swallows. I feel it against my skin, soft and slow, and it goes straight down through me and jerks the ache into a knot.
My knees give.
Not a sway. A drop—the bones just leave—and before I’ve fallen an inch, his arm is around my lower back, one arm, taking my whole weight without seeming to notice it was added.
He doesn’t pull me against him. He holds me close enough to keep feeding, no closer, no looser, my feet barely finding the carpet.
Oh God. Oh, dear God!
My hands are in his shirt, inside the open coat. Both of them. I don’t remember them arriving, one fisted at his chest, one clutching his side, hanging on to the man who is drinking me because he’s the only fixed thing in a room.
Under my fist, through the cotton, his chest is hard and cold and silent.
No heartbeat. I’m holding on to something with no heartbeat, and my body doesn’t care.
My body has one goal now, winding tighter with every pull.
My hips push forward against him. My face tips down until it’s pressed to his collarbone.
I made that contact. He didn’t move me there.
He allows it. The fists, my face, my weight on his arm. Allowed. Noted. Tolerated.
“God!” Out loud now.
His mouth draws at my neck in that slow, deliberate rhythm, and when it crests—
“Oh... oh... yes!” My whole body seizes against his arm.
My thighs shake. Heat rolls through me in long pulses that keep coming after I think they’re done, and my fists wrench his shirt, again and again.
He doesn’t stop drinking. Every pull drags it out longer.
His shirt is the only thing in my hands, so I hold his shirt.
The wolf in me is watching him.
She’s watched every dangerous thing in this building for a year. This isn’t how she looks at a threat. This is long, slow, interested. I slam down on her so hard my whole body jerks in his grip.
No. He’s dangerous, dammit.
She subsides. She doesn’t apologize.
His teeth leave my neck. His tongue crosses the punctures once, and one last pulse rolls through me, smaller, and I hate it as much as the first. Then he moves me—three steps, his arm the only thing keeping me upright—and lowers me into the chair, careful and exact.
My hands come off his shirt last. The creases stay where I gripped him, two crumpled fistfuls of white cotton.
He doesn’t glance at them. He doesn’t smooth them.
“Désolé,” he murmurs. “Next time, you will sit, as I suggested.”
There’s a smear of blood left under my jaw. I feel it cooling. He reaches out and wipes my throat with the pad of his thumb.
Skin on skin. Slow, once, along the line of the vein. I stop breathing. He looks at his thumb after. He doesn’t wipe it clean.
“You could have let me fall.”
“That would be disruptive,” he says.
Level voice. An observation, no more. But he hasn’t moved back to his chair, and the glass is upside down by a decanter he hasn’t opened, and the mud on his shoes has been drying since before I walked in.
“Two days,” I say. “Wherever you were, whatever put that on your shoes—you didn’t stop to change. You came straight here.”
He turns his head toward me. I make myself finish it.
“You needed this.”
He doesn’t confirm it. He doesn’t deny it either. He crosses to the door and opens it.
“The bite has healed,” he says, to the corridor, not to me. And he’s gone. His footsteps go down the hall, and then the sound is gone too.
I sit in the chair with his handkerchief lying by the decanter where he left it, and my legs shaking for reasons I’m no longer sure are just about the bite.
My wolf keeps her eyes on the door.
I get up on the second try, cross the room, and bang on the door for the guard.