25. Chapter 25
Serenity
My fingers are on my throat before I’m awake enough to know I moved them. Two punctures, high on the left side, the skin around them tight and sore. Open.
He closes them. Every time, since the first night, without me ever asking him to. Not this time.
It’s dark, and I don’t know what time it is. No gray under the curtains. No lamp. The sheet over me is heavier than mine.
His room.
My arms are too heavy. There’s a stale taste across my tongue, and my mouth is dry all the way to the back of it. Hollow. Drained. I know this feeling. I had it every morning for a year.
And he’s the one who did it to me.
Then the rest of it comes back. His teeth. My own hand in his hair pulling his mouth down onto my neck because I wanted it there. The pull going on past the place where it stops. The room getting further away from me. My arm sliding off his back because I couldn’t hold it up.
After that there’s darkness. Then his voice very close, saying my name. Then something at my mouth, and swallowing, and being told to stay.
Oh, my God.
He drank too much, and I was gone. I’m sitting up in his bed, so something brought me back, and my mouth remembers swallowing. I don’t know what it swallowed.
My wolf lifts her head.
She’s calm. In spite of everything, she’s calm. She stretches out along the inside of me and settles down again, easy, warm, unbothered about last night.
We nearly died. Why aren’t you upset?
Silence.
I reach for the glamour to see what’s left of me. It comes up thin. I get it over the back of my hand, and the hand goes vague against the sheet. I hold it for one breath and most of another before it slips.
Nine, in the corridor outside the library.
“You’re awake.”
He’s in the chair by the books with no lamp lit, and I have no idea how long he’s been sitting there watching me put it together in the dark.
“How long?” My voice comes out in pieces.
“Long enough that Marthe has been up here four times.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything.”
“No.” He gets up. “It doesn’t.”
He pours water from the jug on the side table and gives it to me. He doesn’t hold it to my mouth. He puts it into my hands, keeps his fingers under mine until he’s sure I’ve got it, then takes them away.
Then he sits down on the edge of the bed.
The water is cold and tastes of the stone jug. I drink the whole glass. He refills it without being asked. I get through half of that before my arms start shaking.
His left sleeve is turned back. There’s a mark across the inside of his wrist, dark, closing, torn rather than cut.
“That was there last night,” I say. “I asked you about it.”
“You did.”
“You told me not to talk.”
“You couldn’t get the words out.”
“I’m getting them out now.”
He looks at his own wrist. Then he pulls the sleeve down over it.
“I lost control,” he says. “I took more than I should have. I knew I had, and I went on taking it, and you stopped being able to hold your head up. It won’t happen again.”
“You lost control.” I put the glass down on the nightstand. “Good to know you can.”
“I’ve had better achievements.”
“I wasn’t congratulating you.”
“No.” His fingers curl once against his knee, then go still. “I know.”
I pull my knees up under the sheet. My throat is dry again already.
“Am I still worth what you paid?”
He doesn’t move.
“Because I’d like to know where I am,” I say.
“You bought me for the blood. I’ve been here long enough to work out what a session used to cost you at that compound, and last night you took what…
three of them? Four? Are you maximizing your investment, or just getting bored of the old way? I’d like to know which, so I can plan.”
His hands are on his knees. I watch them the whole time I’m talking. They don’t do anything at all.
“That’s the question you want answered?”
“It’s the practical one.”
“It isn’t the one you’re asking.”
“Answer the practical one.”
“No,” he says. He’s gone very quiet, and I can’t tell why.
“Why didn’t you close them?” I put two fingers on the punctures. “You always close them.”
“I’d have had to put my mouth on your neck.”
He says it plainly, and then he reaches over and takes my ankle through the sheet. His hand is cool. The weight of it goes through the linen into the bone, and everything in me wants to push my foot into his palm and stay there.
I move my leg away.
No. You don’t get to want that today.
His hand comes back to his knee. He doesn’t say anything about it, and that’s worse than if he’d argued.
“Bastien—”
The door opens.
Yves doesn’t knock. He has never come through a door in this house without knocking first, and now he’s standing in it with the hall light behind him and a folded paper in his hand.
“My lord.”
Bastien is across the room before I’ve registered him standing up. He takes the paper, opens it, reads.
His face changes. Not much—his chin comes up slightly, that’s all—but everything underneath goes cold and flat in a way that has never been pointed at me.
“When did this come?”
“Eleven minutes ago. He’s on the road already.”
“Who carried it?”
“The same one as before. He didn’t get out of the car.”
Then Bastien says something else to him, quick and low—not English, and not the French I’ve started picking pieces of out of this house. Something older-sounding, with harder edges.
I don’t get a word of it. Not one. Yves answers him in the same language, four or five syllables. Bastien says something back. The two of them stand at the door of the room I slept in and have an entire conversation over my head that I cannot follow.
Yves goes.
Bastien takes a jacket off the back of the chair and puts it on.
“You’re going out.”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Out.”
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“No,” he says. “I can’t.”
“Bastien…”
He stops at the foot of the bed. For a second, he’s the man from the kitchen table.
“Marthe will bring food up. Eat all of it. You’ll be dizzy for two days, and you’re not to use the stairs without someone on your arm.” He says it fast. “Ask her for anything you want. Anything at all.”
“You haven’t answered me.”
“I know.”
He puts two fingers under my chin and lifts my face, and he looks at the two marks on my throat. His jaw works once, tight.
“Stay in your rooms tonight,” he says.
“Why?”
He takes his hand back.
“Because I’m asking you to.”
Then he’s gone, and his feet go off down the corridor faster than a man walks.
He owns me. He still has somewhere he has to be. Somebody sent him a piece of paper, and he went cold inside eleven minutes.
I keep forgetting I’m just a tiny part of his world.
I get up. It takes two attempts. The floor tilts under me, and I hold the bedpost until it settles. Then I find his shirt on the chair and put it on. I get as far as the door with one hand on the wall.
The house has changed while I’ve been asleep.
There are lamps burning along the gallery that have never been lit before. Down in the front hall, a man I’ve never seen is standing by the doors with his coat on. He isn’t staff. Nobody in this place stands like that.
Marthe is at the bottom of the stairs with a tray in her hands, and she looks up and sees me on the landing in a man’s shirt with my hair everywhere.
“Back to bed with you,” she says. “I’ve been up those stairs four times today, and I’ll do it a fifth.”
“What’s happening down there?”
“Soup’s happening. Sit down before you’re on the floor.”
Then the front doors open, and I hear the car on the gravel. It goes off down the drive fast enough that the sound of it changes twice before it’s gone.
Yves comes to the foot of the stairs and starts up toward me with his hand out for my elbow.
“You shouldn’t be on the stairs, mademoiselle.”
“There’s a man at your front door who wasn’t there yesterday.”
“There is.”
“He came with the note for Bastien?”
“He did.”
“Yves.” I don’t take his hand. “I spent a year somewhere nobody told me anything. I got very good at figuring things out. Something’s wrong.”
He gets to the step below mine and stops. Behind him, down in the hall, somebody slides a bolt across the front doors.
“Your door hasn’t got a lock on it,” he says. “I noticed it the day you came. I’ll have one put on this afternoon, and you’ll keep it shut tonight.”