11. Chapter 11
Serenity
The guard turns right at the draw station, and my feet carry on left without me.
“Hey.” His hand closes on my arm and pulls me around. “This way.”
“The room’s the other way.”
“Not tonight.”
I walk where he points me. Right runs deeper into the block, past the store rooms, and the air changes as we go. We’re not moving toward the scent of wax, and that unsettles me.
A new room. Why would we go to a new room?
He’s been five times now, and it’s always been the same route, the same door, the same chair by the fire. Now a new room, deeper in, where the building feels less welcoming. I run through everything I said last time, everything I did.
Did I do something? Is this the part where the game changes?
My wolf is awake and low. She doesn’t like the smell down here. Neither do I.
I haven’t showered. I realize that halfway down the corridor. I’ve prepared for every session so far. Tonight they took me straight off the cot in my ward shirt.
So it’s not a session. Then what is it?
The guard stops at a plain wood door, swipes his card, and pushes it open.
The room is stark. Bare walls, concrete floors, and a metal chair bolted in the middle of it. A caged bulb hums overhead. On a folding table by the wall sits a medical bag.
A handler stands at the table with her arms crossed, a woman I’ve never seen, jacket zipped to her chin against the cold.
“Where’s this?” I ask her.
“Sit down.”
“I asked where—”
“And I said sit.”
I cross the floor, and I sit because standing here won’t get me anywhere. The steel chair drags the cold straight through my shirt into my skin. My breath comes out too fast. My heart is going harder than I want it to.
The door opens again.
It isn’t him.
The man who walks in is a vampire—the cold comes off him the same way—but that’s where it ends.
Young. New suit, too much aftershave, something thin and sour underneath it.
He looks at me the way the guards look at the pretty ones, and my wolf comes up, reads him in one breath, and finds everything wrong.
Hunger. Nerves. He’s pleased with himself and agitated underneath, all right on the surface where anyone can see.
She can read him.
She’s never been able to read the other one.
He’s not here.
It goes through me slowly, and then the rest comes with it.
He’s not here, and they’ve sold me to somebody else. That’s what this room is. That’s what I am when he’s not in the building.
I thought I was his. Off the list, fed, kept. I let myself think it.
Stupid. Stupid.
“So you’re the one.” The young vampire comes closer. His shoes are new too. They squeak on the concrete. “They talk about you, you know.”
I set my eyes on the middle distance and keep my face level.
“I paid triple for the hour.” He waits for that to impress me. “Triple.”
“Then you’ve been robbed.”
The handler coughs into her fist. His face flattens. He steps in fast. His hand grips my jaw and shoves my head over to bare my throat, fingers cold, digging in. I grab his wrist with both hands before I can stop myself.
“Hold still,” the handler says, bored. “You’ve been paid for.”
I make my hands let go. I put them on the chair arms and grip the steel. I brace myself for what’s about to happen. The trick. It’ll feel like it feels with him, and it won’t matter, because it never meant anything. I know the trick now.
Let it come.
I don’t want it to. Not with this one.
His mouth hits my throat, teeth first, no preamble at all. I grunt. The sound is out before I know it’s mine. Pain tears down the side of my neck into my shoulder. I wait for it to turn. It doesn’t turn. It stays teeth.
He pulls at the vein in gulps, fast, greedy, and every gulp drags the wound wider.
I hear him swallowing. I feel each swallow as a tug inside my throat, a deep wrong pulling, and cold spreads from the punctures down my chest instead of heat.
My stomach rolls over. Bile climbs into the back of my mouth, and I swallow it down. My nails bend against the steel.
Where is it? Where’s the flood?
I don’t feel it. My legs are shaking. My skin is crawling everywhere his hands touch. His smell is all the way inside my nose now, cologne and sourness and something spoiled underneath.
“Stop!” I didn’t decide to say it. My body wants him off me so badly that my arms are trembling with holding still.
I waited for my body to betray me. It didn’t.
It only does that for him.
My wolf tears herself away from what’s happening, as far from his mouth as she can get inside my own body. Days ago she lifted her head at a vampire and pointed her ears at him, and I slammed her down for it. Now she’s clawing to get away from one.
I had it worked out. It was a trick they all do.
It isn’t.
If it were the trick, this would feel the same. It doesn’t. So the flood was never the trick.
It’s him.
There’s nowhere left to put that except in me.
“Time,” the handler says.
He keeps pulling.
“Time!” She crosses the floor and takes his shoulder.
He comes off my throat wet, breathing hard through his mouth. Blood runs from the wound, warm down my neck, into my collar, and I press my hand over it before I’ve decided to. It pulses against my palm. Open.
He drags the back of his hand across his mouth and blinks at me, his eyes gone loose and unfocused. “They’re right about you. Whatever he’s paying, it’s worth—”
“Out,” the handler says. “Clock’s done.”
He goes. He argues with nobody. The door swings shut behind him. His shoes squeak away down the corridor. I sit there with my hand at my throat, and I can’t get my shoulders to be still.
“Take this.” The handler pries my fingers off the wound and presses a cotton square in their place. Blood has already soaked through my collar. The wound throbs under the cotton, deep, in time with my heart.
“It’s supposed to close,” I say. My voice comes out level, and I hold it there.
“Some of them close it after.” She tears tape with her teeth and straps the cotton down without looking at me.
She hauls me up by the arm. The room swings once and settles. We walk back the way I came, but I’m barely aware of it. I keep one hand out for balance. Every breath pulls at the tape. The whole side of my neck is hot and tight.
We pass cell seven. Kalli’s warmth comes through the wall the same as always, and I keep my eyes forward, because if I look at her door right now, I’m going to start sobbing.
The lock turns behind me. I sit on the cot and put my back against her wall. I’m shaking.
Don’t cry. Don’t you dare cry!
My wolf comes up and plants herself, facing the door. She doesn’t settle. She waits there, hackles up, on watch. Not that she could do much right now. Between the runes and what that animal just did to me, I can barely keep my eyes open.
“Serenity.” Kalli’s voice comes through the concrete, low.
“I’m here,” I manage.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I don’t sound fine.
A pause. “What did they do?”
I open my mouth.
A stranger fed on me. It hurt.
And the worst of it was that he wasn’t the one waiting for me. They sent me to someone else. And I’m not going to say that. Not to her. Not to anyone.
“Serenity.”
The wound beats under the tape. It hasn’t closed.
I press my hand over it, and I don’t answer her.