18. Chapter 18
Serenity
Mrs. Brown comes at nine with a dress over her arm and my future already decided.
“You’ve been sold.” She lays the dress across the bed and smooths it once, more care for the fabric than she’s ever shown anything breathing in this building. “Private buyer. You leave at noon. Eat your breakfast first; you’re to travel fed.”
“What?” I stare at her. Sold. Months of misery, and the sale itself takes four words from a woman who doesn’t look up from a hemline. “Sold to who?”
She gives me a look over the glasses that says I’ve wasted her time. We both know exactly who she’s talking about.
“Lord Val-Serein, girl.” She huffs as if it’s an imposition. “I hear he paid a small fortune for you.”
Val-Serein.
I let that sink in.
Nobody’s said his name to me. Not once, not officially. I know this man as intimately as I’ve ever known anyone. And I don’t even know his name.
“Go on, get ready. Wash. The dress should fit.” She sets a pair of shoes on the floor, brown leather, laces. “Shoes. You remember shoes.”
She takes a key from her pocket and unlocks the cuffs from both my wrists, two quick turns, before I’ve finished processing the shoes. She drops them into a lined case, the only thing in the room she handles carefully.
“House property,” she says.
I rub my wrists; they feel wrong without the weight. Light, in a way that’s going to take some getting used to.
I cross the room slowly. I’m leaving this place. But what am I heading to?
What’s ahead is a house I’ve never seen, belonging to a man whose moods I’ve survived for a month’s worth of feedings. With nobody around to watch. And while I never thought of anyone in this place as a friend, at least there was someone around.
Out of the frying pan…
I don’t let myself finish it.
I wash and dress while she strips the bed around me. The dress fits. The shoes are the strangest part. A year barefoot, and now there’s leather holding my feet in a shape they’ve forgotten. I stand in them, working my toes while Mrs. Brown folds linen with her back to me.
I take the two wool blankets off the chair and hold them out. “The dragon in cell seven. Take these down to her. She runs hot; she won’t need them for warmth, but she can sit on something soft for once. Nobody has to know where they came from.”
Mrs. Brown looks at the blankets, then at me. Something blank and unimpressed settles over her face.
“Blankets are house property.” She takes them out of my arms and lays them on the stripped mattress. “So was your friend, last I checked. You’ve been sold, and she hasn’t. My advice is to stop collecting things you can’t keep. It makes the moves easier.” She checks her watch. “Downstairs by noon.”
“Mrs. Brown…”
She stops, not quite turning back.
“My sister. Grace…”
“Is the least of your worries right now,” she says. “But I hope, wherever she is, she’s learned the same lesson.”
She’s gone before I can ask more.
I stand in the middle of a room that was mine for eleven days, in shoes, holding nothing at all.
The butter knife is on the nightstand. I slide it into the waistband of the dress, against my hip, and it’s cold through the cotton for the first minute.
Sold for a fortune, delivered in a borrowed dress, total worldly assets: one piece of stolen cutlery. My family would be proud.
They walk me down through the lobby at noon.
Two guards, both keeping the careful distance that follows me everywhere since the night he saw the mark on my neck.
A clipboard gets signed at the desk. Someone says “transfer complete” into a phone.
Freight moves through this building all day; today the freight has shoes on.
Then the doors open, and I stop walking.
Sun.
“Oh, my God,” I whisper.
Full sun, straight down a cold blue sky, hitting me across the face. A year of tube lights and one dark window, and now there’s real light lying warm on my cheeks, my eyelids, the backs of my hands. My eyes flood and spill over. My wolf turns her face up inside me and stands there drinking it.
“Keep moving,” a guard says.
“You’ll wait.” I say it with my face tipped up, and I take three more seconds of it, because I’ve just learned what I cost and it was enough to buy me three seconds.
They wait.
Mrs. Brown comes out. “Well, look at you,” she says. “Almost human.” She laughs, but it’s not warm. “Let me get a photo for my scrapbook.”
“Your what?” I turn to her just as she takes the photo with her phone.
“That will be all.” She’s already walking away. I blink and shake my head.
There’s a car waiting. It’s long and black with the rear windows tinted, engine running, heat rolling out when the door opens. Nobody cuffs my hands. Nobody sits beside me. A man is in the front behind a pane of glass.
I’m alone in the back with leather seats, a folded rug, a bottle of water in a little door pocket. I sit there while we drive away, leaving the nightmare behind us.
A nightmare that Kalli still lives in.
I never said goodbye. Or maybe I did and didn’t know it was the last one. That’s how it always goes here. A wall goes quiet. Nobody tells the person on the other side of it anything at all.
She kept me a person when the ward was doing everything it could to make me a number instead. I paid her back with two blankets she’ll never get, and a message I can’t confirm was ever delivered.
I press my fist under my ribs where the guilt sits, hard, until it gives me room to breathe. I’m out. They’re still in there.
I’m coming back for you.
I don’t know how, but I’ll make it happen.
The road runs west, sun on my side of the car.
I put my hand in the patch of light on the seat and leave it there, and when the patch slides with the curves I move my hand to follow it.
Two hours of that. Fields give way to forest, forest to hills, all of it lit, all of it open.
Every mile puts that old world further behind and brings the new one closer: me and the man who bought me.
He said he’d take care of me. He also told me that it lasts until he chooses otherwise. I believe both. That’s the trouble with him. I believe both.
The predator softens the prey before the kill.
The car slows in late afternoon. Iron gates, high as two men, swing open on a drive that runs a half mile through old bare trees, and then the house comes up out of them. I lean forward without meaning to.
Stone. Three stories of it, gray-gold in the low sun, wings running off both sides, a fountain in the turning circle.
It’s older than any building I’ve ever stood in and bigger than the compound, and every single window is shuttered.
Dozens of them, floor after floor, all sealed tight against the daylight.
The sun pours down on it, and the house shuts it all out.
It’s beautiful.
It’s still a place I can’t leave.
The car stops. A woman in gray opens my door before the driver’s out of his seat. Older, straight-backed, human; my wolf finds her heartbeat and two more inside the house.
“Miss Sangrey,” she says, my actual name, said in a courteous voice, with a small bend of the head. “You’re expected. Mind the step.”
The front hall alone is bigger than the compound’s whole lobby.
Warm and lamplit against the shutters, and the smells come at my wolf all at once: beeswax, woodsmoke, old paper, cut flowers in winter…
Gardenia, I think. Stone that’s clearly old.
Underneath them all, I pick up the mineral trace I’ve come to know.
He’s here.
Somewhere below or above, out of the light, asleep or not. His scent is already everywhere. I’m inhaling deeply without thinking about it because that’s what my wolf wants.
The woman in gray takes me up a staircase wide enough for six, along a gallery of dead nobility in framed oil paint, to a door at the southern end.
“Your rooms.”
Rooms?
The door swings open, and I suck in a breath. A sitting room with a fire already burning. A bedroom beyond it with a bed four of me could sleep in. A bathroom in white marble. And on the far wall, tall windows, shuttered like all the rest.
I cross and try one. It opens easily.
The shutters fold back, and the last of the afternoon comes straight in, low gold light down the length of the room, warm on the carpet, warm on my hands. I stand in the middle of it, not breathing. His whole house is sealed against this. My room opens to it.
“His lordship instructed that your shutters remain unlocked,” the woman says from the doorway.
“I… Okay,” I mumble.
“Dusk is at five,” she adds. “The Seigneur will receive you at six. Dinner comes up at seven. The kitchen’s been told what a wolf needs.” A pause, as if she’s deciding whether to say something. She says it. “The house is glad of a guest, miss. It’s been a long time.”
The door closes behind her. Just a handle, plain brass, nothing else built into it. No bolt, no card reader, nothing to lock me in with.
The silence is deep enough that I can hear my own pulse.
Whatever he actually is when nobody’s watching, I start finding out at six o’clock.
The light stretches long across the carpet, goes amber, starts to thin. The sun sinks toward the treeline and takes the warmth off my hands a degree at a time.
Below me, faint through the old floors, the house begins to move. A door. Water in pipes. Footsteps on stone, crossing toward the stairs.
Dusk is at five.
He’s awake.