2. Chapter 2
Bastien
The fire has burned to coals. I should add wood. Instead, I cross to the window and stand there, hands braced on the stone sill, looking down at the same lawns that were there the last time I bothered to look.
My shoulders are tight, have been for weeks. I roll them, feel the muscle pull across my back. A hunt would loosen it, but there hasn’t been one worth the trouble in longer than I care to count.
The house is quiet. Two floors down, Yves crosses the kitchen flagstones and stops near the pantry. The board by the door creaks the way it always does. Beyond the walls, just the trees.
My phone lights up on the side table behind me.
“Yes, Yves.”
“A visitor, my lord. He didn’t call ahead.”
“Name.”
“It is Monsieur Crowe, my lord.”
Three hours in this room, and I haven’t had a reason to leave it. I’m not looking for one.
“Send him away.”
I don’t go back to the chair. I stay at the window, one hand on the sill.
Footsteps in the hall outside. Voices. Yves objecting.
“His Lordship is not available, monsieur. I must insist…”
“He’ll want to hear what I have to say.”
The door opens behind me, and I don’t turn.
“Je vous demande pardon, mon seigneur. Il a insisté.” Yves is breathless.
I raise a hand. “English, Yves. Let’s not be rude to our…guest.” I turn then. “Crowe.”
He fills the doorway, broad through the shoulders, coat heavy enough to be hiding something or just cut for the weather. Leather. Gun oil. Blood underneath both, days old. His eyes move over the room once, quick and complete, then settle on me. Whatever he needed to know, he already has it.
The blood doesn’t interest me. Which tells me exactly how far off tonight’s hunger is.
“Lord Val-Serein.” He shuts the door behind him with the flat of his hand, then sweeps into a bow before stepping into the room. He moves quietly for a man his size, like most of our kind.
“Let’s skip the formalities, shall we? Drink?” I move to the table where the bottle stands and lift it.
“No.” He watches me pour anyway, a fresh glass, not a top-up, my first one sitting half-empty on the chair arm where I left it.
“You never do.” I take the glass and gesture at the chairs across from the one I’ve abandoned. “Sit. You’re making my ceiling look low.”
Crowe picks a chair and lowers himself into it.
“Not there,” I tell him. “That’s Maximilian’s spot.”
His brows rise, but he doesn’t say anything, just takes the chair opposite. Crowe crosses an ankle over his knee and rests one hand on the arm. His fingers are still.
Controlled. Or he’s already decided how tonight goes.
I stay standing, leaning against the mantel, one elbow on the stone, the wine in my other hand. The heat from the coals reaches my back. I don’t feel it warm anything.
“How’s the Court treating you these days?” I ask.
“The Court doesn’t treat me any way.” He looks up at me, unhurried. “I’m not Court.”
“You work for Faine.”
“I work near Faine. There’s a difference.”
“Convenient, that difference.” I drink. Still flat. “She busy?”
“Always.” Crowe doesn’t elaborate.
“Busy with what?”
He doesn’t answer that either.
I push off the mantel and cross to the shelf, lean against it, arms folding. “I heard Marchetti lost his holdings in the south.”
“Marchetti lost his holdings because he couldn’t keep his hands off his own supply.” Crowe shakes his head. “A Turned feeding on his own product. That was a mistake.”
“To get caught, you mean.”
“Not my place to pass judgment.” He uncrosses his ankle, recrosses the other way…the most movement I’ve seen him make since he sat down. “You haven’t been at Court in months.”
“I haven’t had a reason to be at Court in months.”
“That’s what they’re saying.”
“Who’s saying?”
“Everyone who notices when a Seigneur stops showing up.” His eyes don’t move off me. “Some think you’ve gone reclusive. Others think you’re planning something.”
“I’m not planning anything.” I unfold my arms, wrap one hand around the back of my neck, and squeeze. The muscle doesn’t give. “Planning requires interest.”
“And you’re not interested.”
“Not in anything the Court has offered recently. No.”
He watches me. I let him. The coals pop in the grate. Somewhere below us, a tap runs briefly and goes quiet.
“You’re here to involve me in something I’ll regret,” I say.
“Probably.” He doesn’t blink.
“At this hour. Without calling.”
No call. No time to prepare a story. Whatever this is, it moved faster than he expected too.
“If I’d called, you’d have said no already,” Crowe says.
I push off the shelf and cross to the fire. I set my glass on the mantel, then crouch and feed two logs onto the coals. The wood catches. This close, the fire actually warms my face for the first time tonight.
“What do you want, Crowe?” I say it to the fire.
“I have something you might find interesting.”
I look over my shoulder at him. “You always think you do.”
“This time I’m right.”
I stand and brush my hands off on my trousers. Crowe lifts his chin and tracks me across the room.
“Eighteen months,” I say. “Since the Cassar business. The last time you sat in that chair.”
“I remember.”
“You broke my banister.”
“He broke your banister.” Crowe’s fingers tap once on the chair arm. “I broke him. The banister was incidental.”
“Seventeenth-century ironwork. The man I hired to restore it was profoundly irritated. What kind of proposal do you have for me, Crowe?” I pick up my wine from the mantel where I left it.
He shifts his weight forward, forearms coming down onto his knees. “Something that needs your reputation. Your standing. Someone willing to walk into a room full of people doing exactly what the Court wants stopped.”
“The Court wants a great many things stopped.”
“This one Faine wants stopped. Personally. And she’d prefer that it stays between us.”
She doesn’t ask for things the easy way. This one, she can’t even put her name on.
“My reputation,” I say. I move back toward him, slowly, and lean on the edge of the table rather than taking the chair. “Which one? I’ve built more than one.”
“The one where you spend freely on things most people won’t discuss at dinner.” Crowe looks up at me.
“That reputation is well earned.”
“That’s why it works.”
I turn the glass in my fingers. The wine catches the new firelight, deeper now, moving.
“You’re not going to tell me what this is,” I say.
“Not tonight.”
“But you want an answer tonight.”
“I want to know you’ll hear the rest.” He straightens in the chair. “Tomorrow evening. My terms, my location.”
“And if I say no?”
“Then I leave and find someone else, who’ll probably be less suitable.” He stands, buttons his coat one-handed, already moving for the door.
“You seem very sure I won’t say no.”
He pauses at the door. Turns back, and his eyes drop to the glass in my hand.
“You let me in this late, without a call, and poured a second glass before I’d even sat down. You were preparing yourself to listen. And you haven’t sat still since I got here, my lord. You’re bored.” He opens the door. “Tomorrow.”
The door closes. His footsteps go down the stairs, steady, same pace out as in.
Nobody’s read me that fast in years.
I don’t know what Faine wants stopped badly enough to send Crowe to my door without calling. Soon, apparently, I will.