21. Chapter 21
Bastien
Yves is waiting outside my door when I rise for the evening, which means something has already happened without me.
“The mademoiselle requests your company,” he says, before I can ask what became of the dinner I ordered. “In the kitchen. She’d like you to come down when you’re ready, rather than go to the dining room.”
“Would like, or told you to say she’d like?”
“The second, my lord. Word for word, if you want it repeated.”
I don’t. I go down.
Serenity’s at the long table with Maximilian near her feet and flour on one wrist. Marthe stands over her shoulder, saying something about the water wanting a full boil before the vegetables go in.
Her hair is tied back with a strip of ribbon, and she’s in a yellow sundress with no business being worn in winter.
There’s color in her face that didn’t come from any fire in this kitchen.
She looks up and smiles as I walk in, and my stride falters for a second.
“You’ve been outside,” I say.
“The garden.” She looks back down at the pot. “The small one off the building. I was out there this afternoon.”
“You could have told someone. Freezing in a garden isn’t the ending I had in mind for you.”
“I wasn’t cold.” She glances at me again. “I don’t get cold the way I used to. Small mercies.”
Marthe straightens at the stove and looks over at me.
“She wanted to cook, my lord. I wasn’t about to stop her.” Back to the pot. “It’s a good stew. Better than anything I’d have managed tonight.”
“My grandmother’s recipe,” Serenity says. “More or less. I’m guessing at two of the herbs. I was much younger the last time I watched her make it.”
“Then it’s your recipe now.”
“I suppose it is.”
We sit at the small table by the window; her choice, apparently, made before I came down. I watch her eat. I haven’t chewed a mouthful of anything in a long time, but I could watch her doing it for hours. The woman eats like a starving wolf. Probably because she is one.
“It’s good,” I say when she pauses for a breath.
“How would you know?” She wrinkles her nose at me. “You don’t eat.”
“Yes, but I can watch you. And you’re eating it with your whole face.” I reach forward and wipe a splash of sauce off her chin with my thumb. Her cheeks go pink. Pinker than the garden made them.
“Do you remember your last meal? As a human?” she asks, and the question unbalances me because nobody has ever asked.
“Queue de B?uf Braisée au Vin de Bordeaux,” I say after a moment. “Paired with a very good red. Perhaps too much of that, since it led to my untimely…transition.”
“Boof Bra-what?” She takes another mouthful.
“Oxtail,” I say. “In red wine.”
She chews and swallows, and her throat works. I watch it, and for once it isn’t the vein I’m looking at.
“You have a good memory,” she says.
“The years don’t blur anything for us. If they did, it might be a mercy.”
She sets her spoon down. “How did you become…you know…”
“Undead?”
She nods.
“Horse riding accident. Broke my neck.” My fingers go to the back of my neck while I say it. “An ancient had been watching me, mingling in the same circles. She knew it was only a matter of time before I did something reckless. I was made that night.”
“How old were you?”
“Thirty-three.”
“And that’s the way you’ve been since then?”
“That’s the way I will always be.”
“Wow.” She picks the spoon back up, turns it over, sets it down again without using it. “Have you outlived people you loved?”
“All of them.” There’s no way to say it that doesn’t sound like I’m asking for something back, so I don’t try to soften it. “Every mortal I have ever cared for is dead. Wives, lovers, friends. All gone.”
She’s quiet at that, circling her spoon through what’s left of the stew.
“My mother died when I was twenty-two. Cancer.” She says it like she’s accepted it. “Syndicate took us within the year. Grace and me.”
I wait for her to go on. Her stew’s growing cold, but I don’t mention that either.
“Mama was the one who taught me the glamour. Badly. In a kitchen not so different from this one, because she was too frightened to teach it anywhere she thought someone might see.”
“Frightened of what?”
“Of what happens to our kind when we get noticed.” She looks up at me. “I imagine you’ve read files on me.”
“I know what you are. Wolf. Witch. Both run in your blood. Rare.”
She gives a small snort. “Rare. There was a time I felt special to be a Sangrey. Now…not so much. I guess Mama was right to be frightened.”
“Mama… She was French?”
“Canadian. She spoke the language, but I never picked it up. I’ve always thought it was beautiful though.” She looks down at her bowl where the stew is starting to set around the edges. She pushes it away. “You’re French too. Proper French. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Say something to me.” She leans forward with her elbow on the table and rests her chin in her palm. “Something in French.”
I look at her, with her hair golden and her cheeks pink from the sun. The garden is on her. Frost and cut yew, and under it something warm that has rarely been in a house like this one.
“Tu es aussi rayonnante que le soleil, Serenity Sangrey.”
“What does that mean?”
I reach a hand out and brush a silky curl from her cheek. She doesn’t flinch. “You are as lovely as the sunshine.”
Her eyes are wide on my face. Neither of us says anything.
Eventually, she breaks the silence. “Do you miss it? The sun?”
“Every day.” And then, before I’ve decided to: “Until—”
“Until what?”
Until you.
I don’t say it. Crowe was right. She’s a drug, and I’m addicted. And now I’ve brought her into my home and put the terms of my next fix into her hands.
It’s a game. All part of the game.
She watches me not finish the sentence. She could press me for an answer. She lets me off instead.
“I explored today,” she says, and picks her spoon back up. “Found the walled garden and the library. You have a lot of books. And clocks.”
“Ah,” I say, wondering how long it will be before that starts to go dull.
“There are worse ways to spend a day than in a house like this one.” A small shrug. “Like being locked in a living blood bank.”
“The bar isn’t high, then.”
She flicks a look up at me. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful for being out of there. And that’s because of you. Plus, it was nice to get to know Marthe and the others.”
My staff. A house full of people who will always be careful with her. I didn’t think this through.
Of course you didn’t.
I acted on impulse. Getting her out of there outweighed common sense.
“There are grounds to explore too,” I tell her. “The forest is unspoiled.”
“Yes.” Her head bobs. “Yes, I’d like that.”
Yves appears before I can say anything else, and one look at his face tells me the evening is finished.
“My lord. A car at the gate.”
“Whose?”
“Crowe’s man. He says it’s urgent and wouldn’t tell me more than that.”
Putain!
I’m on my feet. Weeks of waiting for exactly this kind of urgency, and it’s chosen tonight to arrive.
“I have to go.”
“Now?”
“Now. I have business to attend to.”
“All right.” Her hands stop on the table, and if I didn’t know better, I’d read it as disappointment. “Will you be back tonight?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay.” She stands and starts gathering the bowls without being asked, the way a person does when they need somewhere to put their hands. “You have business. I understand business.”
I’m nearly at the door when I stop.
She’s at the table, stacking bowls that don’t need stacking, and I realize something I should have known all along: she is not going to sit around here being patient. She spent a year being patient in a cell. She doesn’t have another year of it left in her. Not for me, not for anyone.
I have kept women before. I have never had to consider whether they were content. It was never part of the arrangement, because the arrangement was never quite like this.
What is this?
I have no idea. But I’d better start finding out.
“Serenity.”
She looks up.
“Thank you for…helping Marthe today.” It isn’t what I meant to say. She smiles anyway, small and real, and the drive out of the estate feels like the wrong direction before I’ve reached the car.
Crowe’s man drives too fast down roads he clearly doesn’t trust, and I spend the whole of it turning over a problem I have never had to solve before.
Her happiness.
I have never had to think about it before tonight, because I have never kept anything whose unhappiness could touch me.
By the time we reach the gate, I’ve already decided what I’m going to do about it, and it has nothing to do with whatever Crowe is about to brief me on.