CHAPTER 29 #4
He sliced the bread. He cut two wedges of the cheese — a hard mountain pecorino Adrienne had brought back from Geneva in November. He cut the pear into eighths. He set the plate in front of her.
She picked up the fork.
He sat across from her. He picked up his own fork.
He had not eaten mortal food in seven months.
He had decided last night, after the saber had gone back on the wall above the settee on floor thirty-five and the lobby had been quiet for an hour, that he would eat tonight, with her.
The bond would let him; the bond, he was about to find out, would actually want him to.
She ate. She closed her eyes at the first bite. She had not eaten since lunch.
He ate. The pear at the back of his teeth was the first sweetness in his mouth since June.
The cheese was the salt of every meal he had ever had in a country with vines.
The bread was bread; the bread was Helene's; the bread was the small competent miracle of yeast and flour his five-hundred-year-old body suddenly remembered.
The omelette was warm and yellow and a half-shade darker at the rim than he had meant — the butter had run ahead of him — and she ate the whole half and pushed the second half toward him with the side of her fork.
He ate it.
She drank a glass of sparkling water. He drank one with her.
She said: "Vance."
He said: "Quinn."
She said: "Take me to bed."
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## Eliza — 21:30
He carries me. I let him. The penthouse is quiet; the dishes are stacked at the kitchen sink with a small tea towel laid over them; the housekeeping will get them at six tomorrow. He takes me up to the bedroom. He sets me on the bed.
He gets in beside me.
He does not pull me into him. He lies on his side. He puts his left forearm across my sternum, the brand against my skin between my breasts. The brand is warm. The warmth is small and even and human-skinned, the warmth of his own body, which is the warmth of mine.
I put my right palm over the brand. The way I have slept with him since Ch 18. The configuration is the same. The temperature is not.
He says: "Sleep, Quinn."
I sleep.
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## Julian — 21:45 → 06:00
He did not sleep at first. He watched her sleep.
Her breath had slowed at twenty-one fifty-three to the regular long slow draw he had learned by heart in eight weeks; she had a small sigh at the third minute of any sleep, and then a long exhalation, and then she was under.
He timed it. The sigh came at twenty-one fifty-six.
The long exhalation at twenty-one fifty-seven.
She was under at twenty-one fifty-eight.
The clasp at his sternum was the most extraordinary thing he had ever held in his body.
It was a lifting, an unburdening: the absence of the cold he had been carrying for five centuries — which he had not known, until the absence, had had a weight at all.
He had been moving through the world for half a millennium with the weight of a brand the size of his forearm tied to his chest, and the weight had been the constant of his existence, and the weight was gone.
He understood, at twenty-two ten, why Helene had cried at her sire's bond ceremony in 1934 — not the bond ceremony of Eliza and Julian, the other one, the one in Bologna, that she had attended as second physician at her sire's invitation, and had not spoken of since.
He understood, at twenty-two fifteen, why Adrienne had been silent about the bond Gideon had offered her and she had refused in October 1812, two months before Gideon was murdered.
He understood, at twenty-two thirty, why the council had let the bond ritual stand inviolate since 1924 when it would have been easier to abolish it. The bond was the only thing the council had that was not commerce.
He laid his head back against the pillow at twenty-two thirty-five.
He turned the inside of his left forearm and looked at the brand under the moonlight from the eastern window.
The six spokes. The wheel. The scab where her four teeth had broken the silver scar.
The faint pink at the rim that meant his body was healing tissue that had not healed in his lifetime.
He pressed the brand gently against her sternum where her right palm covered it.
The warmth of her palm and the warmth of his forearm were the same temperature now.
He did not know how to distinguish the two. He stopped trying.
He slept at twenty-two fifty.
He slept the deep clean sleep of a man whose body had finally finished the work it had carried since 1547.
He slept under the wool blanket Helene had pulled over both of them at nineteen fifty when she came in to take the dishes.
He slept until five fifty-eight, when his body — out of five centuries of habit — woke at the moment the blackout shades began their descent.
The shades came down at six. The room went dark. He stayed beside her. He did not stir her.
He had told Helene at twenty-one forty-five, in the corridor as she came up with the dishes-collection: Raise the shades at sunrise tomorrow. Override the December schedule. Once. Helene had nodded. Capito, mio re. He had not told Eliza.