17. Chapter 17
Bastien
I stand in the room for six minutes before I make myself walk out of it.
Six minutes.
I count them off. My hand didn’t shake until the door closed behind me. It stops trembling at minute three, and I stand there. The attendant at the stairs keeps his eyes on the opposite wall the entire time. He’ll live longer that way.
Then I walk down through the lobby, past the night men who straighten as I pass, out to the car. Yves pulls onto the access road, and the compound falls away behind us. I sit in the dark leather with my coat buttoned, my thoughts refusing to line up.
Nothing has changed. Nothing.
And my mind is working, running over problems I had counted as covered.
The protection order holds. Vasile will enforce it to the letter, because he knows what will happen if he doesn’t.
But an order is only as strong as the fear that carries it, and fear needs feeding.
I come here twice a week. That leaves five nights for them to fill behind my back.
A house bleeding money on its best earner.
A guard on a bad salary opening a door for the right envelope.
She’s theirs on paper. And she’s not safe as long as she belongs to them.
“Yves. Turn around.”
The car slows. He takes the next farm entrance, swings us, and the headlights come back around. Within minutes, we’re back at the compound gates.
The night manager meets me in the lobby with his collar undone.
“Get him,” I say. Whatever he sees on my face has him on his phone without asking anything else.
I stand in the lobby listening to the building: the generator behind the east wall, twenty-odd heartbeats stacked through the floors below, slow with sleep.
One of them, I could find with my eyes closed.
Not yet.
Vasile arrives inside ten minutes. The cologne he keeps for clients doesn’t cover the sweat under it. The man ran here from his quarters. Good. That works for me.
“My lord.” The bow is perfect. His pulse is at a sprint. “The house is honored, at any hour. How may—?”
“Your office. Now.”
We go back to the room with the false window, velvet drawn over concrete, brandy on the sideboard. He moves toward the decanter out of pure habit, and the look on my face stops him.
He sits behind his desk instead. I stay standing.
“My lord, I can assure you that not one other has touched—”
“I’m buying her,” I say. “Outright. Tonight.”
His mouth opens and closes once. “Lord Val-Serein, you’ve already reserved her for as long as she entertains you. But what she brings us across a year, you can’t simply—”
“I know precisely what she brings you. I’m offering you a decade of it before dawn. Say yes, Vasile.”
The number I name makes his eyes go wide.
I watch him work through it: a decade of the Sangrey yield, in one sum, tonight.
Against that: years of draws, storage, risk, and a source that might not survive the process.
His hands come together on the blotter. His heartbeat has changed rhythm, greed and terror alternating.
“The sum is—” he starts. “My lord, the sum is extraordinary, and I am not— The classification is designated. Committed. A sale of this asset isn’t mine to authorize. There are levels—” He’s babbling. Money does that.
“I don’t care about levels. Make it happen.”
He looks at the phone on his desk, in no hurry to touch it. “It’s four in the morning.”
“Then wake them.”
“My lord—”
“Your superiors keep our hours, Vasile.” I take the chair across from him at last and rest one hand on the armrest. “Dial.”
He dials from memory—no book, no card, eleven digits his fingers know in the dark. It picks up on the first ring.
“Duty desk.” A woman’s voice, level, awake.
“Vasile. Compound six. I need a designation released for sale.” His voice grows firmer as he goes; this is a channel he’s used before, just never for this. “Sangrey classification. Full transfer of title.”
Silence on the line. Not dead air; I can hear a room behind it. A pen on paper. Another conversation, too far off to resolve. Not English. Romanian. Then the voice again.
“Purchaser.”
“A private client. Standing account, exclusivity arrangement, excellent history with the house—”
“Val-Serein,” the voice says.
Vasile stops talking. He never said my name.
His eyes come up to mine, and my face stays pleasant, while something sharpens in my chest. The people at the top of these stairs know their clients without being told.
That’s worth reporting to Crowe before the week is out, whether or not I tell him how I learned it.
“Yes,” Vasile manages.
“The offer.”
He names my number. The pen on the other end writes something. The distant conversation stops.
“Add twelve percent,” the voice says. “Origination and release. Non-negotiable.”
Twelve percent, invented between one breath and the next. They know exactly how badly a man wants something by four in the morning, and they price it accordingly. Whoever sits at the top of this trade, I already like them better than everyone beneath them.
“Done,” I say, to the room.
A pause on the line, brief, while the voice weighs whether a client speaking directly is something to object to. At that price, it isn’t.
“Papers before noon,” it says. “Congratulations on your acquisition, Seigneur.” The line goes dead.
Vasile sets the handset down with both hands. He’s sweating freely now, and the relief is all over him; the relief of a man who has just converted his most dangerous liability into a number with a lot of zeros. And now she can’t be tortured or die of anemia or bring a vampire’s rage into his world.
We do the papers at his desk. Bill of transfer. Release of designation.
My signature has bought paintings, estates, the silence of two governments. Tonight it buys a twenty-three-year-old woman, itemized, and I sign it the way I sign everything else.
“Delivery,” I say, setting his pen down. “Tomorrow, before dusk. Daylight hours. My staff will receive her. A closed car, heated. She travels awake. No sedation, no restraints, no handlers in the passenger compartment. She’s fed before she leaves, and she’s told where she’s going.”
“Told, my lord?” His hand pauses over the schedule. “The stock isn’t generally informed of—”
“She isn’t your stock. As of four minutes ago, she isn’t your anything.” I stand. “She’s told, in plain words, by someone with the sense to be civil about it. If she arrives at my gate afraid, I’ll want a written account of every hour of her morning, with names attached.”
“Of course. Of course, my lord.” He writes all of it. Then his pen stops on its own, and he looks at the schedule a moment longer than it needs. “And the house’s— That is… Your visits, my lord. The standing sessions. Shall I close the account?”
There it is. A buyer keeps buying. An owner has no reason to walk back through that lobby, and a man who does raises questions. I’ve compromised my cover.
You’re a fool.
“Keep the account open,” I say. “The house has other interests worth my evenings.”
“The house is honored.”
It changes nothing. There is one thing that matters tonight. And she’s upstairs, asleep behind a locked door. By tomorrow dusk, that lock will be on a door in my own house, and every key to it will be mine.
Vasile walks me down himself, past the night men and the doors. Outside, the floodlights have gone thin, and past the east fence the sky has started to gray at its lowest edge.
Dawn, not far off.
I stand on the steps and watch it a moment longer. Below, the car is running. Yves has one eye on the same horizon.
“We must hurry, my lord.” It’s one of the few times I’ve heard him anxious.
“Yes. She follows later.”
If the words surprise him, he doesn’t show it.
The car takes the access road. The compound slides away. The gray in the east climbs one shade while I watch it through the glass.