24. Chapter 24
Bastien
The mark on my hand hasn’t closed. I’ve had a blade through this palm. I had a horse come down on it outside Lyon, and the bones knitted before the animal was up.
Everything I have ever done to this body has healed inside the hour. This split runs from the knuckle to the wrist bone, and it’s been open for three days, brown at the edges, pink in the middle. When I flex my fingers, the skin pulls.
Only one thing marks my kind like that. It doesn’t come through shutters by itself.
I woke that evening into a room sealed tighter than I’d left it.
The curtains had been dragged past each other.
A blanket was pushed along the floor under the hem, worked in hard, the full width of the wall.
My jacket was stuffed into the gap at the frame, and there was a print in the dust on my desk where somebody had stood to reach the rail.
So she opened it, then she closed it, then she went round that room on her knees in the dark making certain it couldn’t happen twice.
She had my life in her hands for as long as it took to decide something; she gave it back, and now she doesn’t want me to know she did.
I’ve nearly asked her a dozen times since: at the table, in the gallery, last night with her asleep on my arm. I put it down every time. She’d lie to me, she’d know I knew, and I’d have made her do it for nothing.
She asked me once whether anything had ever marked me. I said no. That was true when I said it, and now there’s a scar on my hand that she put there, and I’d take it again tomorrow.
She’s in the library when I come down, feet up under her in the chair by the ladder, one of my books open on her knee.
“You’re reading my Montaigne.”
“I’m not reading anything. It’s in French.” She turns it round to show me the page. “Somebody argued with the whole first chapter in the margins.”
“Somebody was twenty-six and insufferable.”
“You.”
“Me.”
“Then translate it.”
“Absolutely not.”
That gets her off the arm of the chair laughing, and when I hold my hand out for the book, she takes my wrist instead and turns my hand over. She looks at the mark for a long moment. Her heart rate climbs. Her expression doesn’t change.
I make myself wait.
“Does it hurt?” she says.
“No.”
“Will it go?”
“It will fade.”
Her thumb moves once across the edge of the split. Then she puts the book into my hand, and she’s already walking when she says, “Come up, then,” and she doesn’t look back to see whether I will.
I go up.
The dress is off before I’ve shut the door.
She comes at me, and I take her mouth, and she opens under it.
I get her back against the bedpost with my hand spread on her stomach, and she is warm everywhere.
That’s the thing I have no answer for. Not the blood.
The heat coming off her—her arms, her throat, her thighs—all day, without her doing a single thing to make it.
I hold my palm there until it stops being cold.
Then I lift her onto the bed and put my mouth on her breast, sucking the nipple hard between my lips while my tongue works the tip.
Her back comes up off the sheet. My gums are aching.
The fangs push down, and I hold them seated.
My jaw aches all the way to the hinge, and the ache is welcome; it’s something to do that isn’t tearing into her.
“You’re being careful again,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Don’t be.”
She has no idea what she’s asking me for. Every instinct in me is to sink my teeth into her and never stop drinking. So I hold it down and put my mind on her instead.
I slide my hand between her legs, and she’s already wet enough that my fingers go into her with no work at all, sliding deep into slick heat.
“Bastien!” Her nails dig into my forearm as she sucks in a gasp.
I stay there, watching her face as I work her, until her eyes are glazed and she’s tossing her head, cheeks flushed pink.
Then I go down her body and slide my mouth over her mound, tongue parting her folds to lap at the wet center, then circling her swollen clit.
The heat of her comes up on my tongue. I’m cold through, and she’s hot.
I work my tongue over her clit slowly while she tries to get her hips off the bed, grinding against my face.
I hold her down with my forearm across her belly.
My fingers keep moving in her, pumping and curling into places that make her jolt. When her knees come in against my head, I push them back open and don’t stop, sucking her clit between my lips while I pump three fingers deep.
“Bastien! Right there. Don’t—” Her hand comes down and grips my forearm, and she gets no further with the sentence.
She comes with her nails dug hard into my arm, her whole body pulling tight around my fingers and tongue, then letting go all at once. She’s shaking under me when I come up over her.
“Now,” she says. “I want you inside me now.”
I push into her. She’s tight and hot, and I go in by degrees, the walls gripping every inch.
It takes everything I have. My arms lock.
A shake starts in the left one, and I drop my weight down into it to steady it.
She presses her palm to my chest, over the place where a heartbeat should be, and holds it there.
“Hard,” she says. “Take me hard.”
“Give me a moment.” At this rate, I’m not going to last long.
“No.” She wraps her legs around me and pulls, and I go all the way in, flush against her.
Then I move. Her heartbeat is thunderous. I feel it in my skin, under my hands, everywhere I’m touching her, hammering faster because of what I’m doing to it.
“Oh! Just like that...” Her nails come down my back, scoring skin. I find the pace she wants and hold it there, thrusting hard and steady, and she meets me every time, hips lifting to take me deeper.
“Yes.” She’s saying it into my hair, over and over. “Yes— Bastien...take it—” and her hand comes up and pulls my mouth down onto her throat.
I sink my teeth into her flesh.
The first pull comes up loaded, and her taste arrives and goes, the way it always goes. I’ve never kept it past the swallow. So I pull again to get it back, and it goes again, and I pull again, and all the while I keep moving inside her, and she keeps meeting me.
Ten. Ten is the number. Ten deep swallows since the first night in that room with the fire, whatever her condition, whatever her body was doing to keep me there.
One. Two. She’s working under me, her legs tightening around my waist.
I’m not cold anymore. She’s put her heat all through me, her body under mine and her blood going down, up my arms and into my chest, and none of it is mine, and I don’t care.
Three. Four. Her hand is on my neck, keeping me at her throat.
Five. Six. Seven.
I always know when to stop. I always know.
I don’t stop.
Eight. Nine.
I get my mouth off her, and her grip tightens on my neck. “More.” Her breath is hot against my cheek. “I want to feel more...”
The part of me that has always measured every mouthful stops measuring, and what’s left is her taste arriving and vanishing and my hips driving into her. I come with my teeth in her throat and my fist in the sheet, spilling deep while I keep drinking.
I’m still drinking. Drunk on it.
Her hips are moving under me, chasing her own finish, and then they aren’t. I take the slowing for her crest arriving.
It isn’t.
Her hand slides off my neck, down my spine, onto the bed.
Her heart is a long way off, and it’s slow.
I come off her throat.
Too much. I’ve taken too much!
She’s under me with her head turned into the pillow, her mouth open, blood down her neck into her hair. Her eyes are half shut with nothing behind them.
“Serenity.”
Nothing.
I get her up against my chest, and her head goes back over my arm, and I catch it in my hand. She’s cooling. She has never been cool in her life. She has been the one warm thing in my world since the day the car brought her to my door, and I’m holding her while it goes out of her.
Her heart takes a beat. Waits. Takes another.
Merde. Non... Non... Non!
The beat stops completely.
“Serenity! God...please!” I’ve never heard my voice sound like this. I shake her, and her head lolls. Still no beat.
“No... no!” I growl it. And then I make a decision.
I put my own wrist between my teeth and tear it open.
It’s forbidden. Not without permission. Without being signed off by a dozen elders. I press my wrist to her mouth anyway.
“Drink.”
Nothing. I work my fingers into the back of her jaw, open her mouth, hold my wrist hard against her lips.
“Drink. Drink!” I press hard. “Mon Dieu... Ah, mon Dieu!”
Fool! You fucking fool!
Her throat moves. Once, then again. Her hand comes up off the bed and closes around my forearm to hold it where it is. I feel it going down her.
“That’s it.” My mouth is in her hair. “Stay. Look at me. Stay.”
Her eyes open. They don’t work at first. They go across the ceiling, across my face, past it. Then they come back and settle on me. Her hand is around my arm.
Her heart comes up under my palm. One beat, then two together, then a run of them.
“Bastien,” she says.
“Don’t talk.”
“Your arm—” Her voice is a scrape.
“Don’t talk.”
I take my wrist back. She’s too weak to make me answer, and she stops trying. I hold her against my chest until her heart climbs into something I recognize.
Then I fetch the basin from the washstand.
I soak the cloth, wring it out, sit on the edge of the bed and clean her throat, going carefully round the punctures because I can’t put my mouth on her tonight.
The blood has run under her collarbone and dried there.
I work it off her skin with the corner of the cloth, and when I’m done, I fold it and lay it over the marks and hold it there with two fingers.
She lifts her hand and puts it over mine. She doesn’t say anything, and neither do I.
I told myself it was just for the blood. Just a game to amuse myself. I said it to Crowe, and I tried to convince Odile.
I’ve been lying to myself.
Her heart stopped in my hands, and I have never been so afraid.
I put the basin on the floor. My hands aren’t steady; no part of me is steady.
Her eyes are shut, and her breathing has evened into something almost normal. I stroke the hair from her pale cheek, then gather her up against me and press my lips to the top of her head.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
I’d give up her blood tonight. I’d never taste her again for the whole of what she’s got left. I’d sit across a fire from her for fifty years with her blood untouched, if the alternative is what her heart was doing four minutes ago.
The irony is that the magic in her blood stops me from remembering it. It’s why I’ve kept going back for more. I can never get enough of it.
That has to change now.
She’s supposed to be safe here.
Beyond Crowe and Faine’s Court and all that’s expected of me, I know why I’ve been going into that compound.
To root out the people who priced her. Burn the file, burn her rare blood classification, and she stops being worth hunting.
And then, if she stays here, it’s because she wants to, not because she has no other choice.
I haven’t called Crowe with a report. Three nights now, and every one of them I’ve found a better use for my hands than a telephone.
I told myself she was safe here.
Nobody in that building did this to her tonight.
I did.
She’s asleep by the time I’ve thought it through. I lean back against the headboard, settle her onto me, and she curls closer without waking. She’s warm now. Warming my skin.
Her heart goes on under my palm. Ninety-two. Ninety-four.
I count them because I can’t make myself do anything else.