19. Chapter 19
Bastien
I move the candlesticks four inches to the left, and the housekeeper watches me do it.
“They were centered, my lord.”
“They were in her sightline, Marthe.” I step back from the table. White linen, crystal, the good silver that hasn’t been out of its felt since before she was born. Two places set at one end of a table built for twenty. “The kitchen?”
“On schedule, my lord. As it was at five, when you asked.” She pauses, then goes on because she’s been with me for decades and earned the right to be bold. “You’ve inspected this table twice.”
I send her out, and I stand alone in my own dining room.
I’m not sure what to do with myself. I dressed tonight with more care than I’ve given a coronation. And the reason is coming down my staircase right now, heart racing, feet quick and light on the landing. I’ve never checked the cutlery for guests.
She stops in the doorway at six exactly.
The gown is dark green, long sleeves, simple, and she wears it with her spine straight, chin level.
I pick up her scent. The compound is finally washed out of her.
For the first time since I’ve known her, she smells only of herself, warm skin and clean hair, the wolf underneath both.
No bleach. No fear-sweat. I’d pay the price again for that alone.
“I don’t know your name,” she says, lingering.
I tilt my head. It never occurred to me. “My apologies. I am Sébastien-Laurent, fifth Seigneur of the house of Val-Serein.”
She blinks. “Se…Se… Say what?”
“You may call me Bastien.”
“Bastien,” she repeats. “You bought me.”
“Yes.”
“So that you can drain me completely?”
“No.”
“Am I your…what? Concubine? Blood slave?”
“None of those. You are your own person, Serenity.”
“Really? Can I leave?” Her first line of questioning, before anything else. She stands in my house in my silk and asks the only thing that matters to her.
“No,” I say. She’d recognize a lie. “Everything else in this house is yours.”
“Not my freedom.”
“No. Not that.”
“Why?”
“Because you are worth money to them out there. I paid to get you off their inventory list, but there’s a demand. And that is something I can’t control out there. Here, I can.” It’s more than I expected to admit. I can’t say why I did it.
Her throat works. “They’ll hunt me down and take me back.”
“Yes.” I don’t dress it up.
She holds my eyes for three heartbeats. Then she nods once and walks in, reading the room as she comes. Exits. Windows. The two attendants at the wall.
“Then let’s see the food,” she says.
The laugh gets out of me before I approve it. Short, real, the first one this room has heard in years. Both attendants find something to study on the sideboard.
“You look beautiful,” I say, drawing her chair. I say it because I mean it, and that surprises me. I lost interest in beauty a long time ago.
“I look expensive. There’s a difference.”
“There is. I’ve bought many expensive things.” I push the chair in under her. “Beautiful walked in on its own and asked if she could leave.”
She giggles, then covers her mouth with her hand.
And I am charmed.
The first course goes down. Her hand hovers over the row of forks.
“Outside in,” I say. “Invented by people with too much silver and little to talk about.”
“Which are you?”
“Both. With any luck, you’ll change that.”
She tries the soup carefully, inhaling as she does. Then her eyes close over the spoon, one breath, and when they open, she catches me watching. She lowers her eyes and keeps eating, faster now, the way you eat when plates get taken away.
“There’s more,” I say. “There is always more. Send an empty plate down and ask again. The kitchen will love it.”
“What is it?”
“Venison, from the estate.” I watch her over my glass. “You’re free to ask for anything else. Tell them what you like, it appears. Tell them what you miss, it appears twice.”
“What I miss.” She looks at me while she decides whether to open up. “My grandmother made a stew. Lamb, white beans, rosemary. Every Sunday the whole house smelled of it by noon.” Her voice stays level all the way through. Against the table, her hand has closed on the napkin.
“Then on Sunday,” I say, “your house will smell of it by noon. You can have anything you want.”
She looks at her plate. When she looks up, something in her face has eased, just slightly.
“Anything?”
“Name it.” I’m feeling benevolent. Maybe it’s a mistake.
She licks her lips. “My sister. Grace. They took her too. I don’t know if she’s alive. I don’t know what happened to her after they split us up, and nobody in that building would ever tell me.” The words are rushed. “Can you find out?”
I set my glass down.
“I’ll look into it,” I say.
She holds my eyes, deciding how much of that to believe. Then she nods once, and lets it go.
There’s silence while I watch her eat. She breaks it.
“You’ve got a lot of paintings.” It’s awkward, and she’s trying, and I like it.
“Family,” I say, as if it’s a topic I enjoy.
“My aunt Célestine.” I nod at the portrait behind her.
“By marriage. She poisoned two husbands. One for cruelty, one for boredom. She considered boredom to be the worst crime. She was never charged, and she lived to ninety-one, and every wife in the district sent flowers to her funeral.”
Serenity turns right around in her chair to look. Célestine looks back down at her, lace to the chin, lapdog under one arm.
“Boredom,” Serenity says. “The worst crime.”
“So she said.”
“You knew her?”
“I sat beside her at her second husband’s funeral. She complained the speech was too kind.” I refill her water before the attendant can move. “She’d have liked you. She kept a knife in her prayer book.”
“A butter knife?”
I smile. “Something sharper.”
She turns back around, and the smile she’s been holding off all evening gets free, quick and crooked. I sit with my wine and watch it happen.
“You’re being charming,” she says. An accusation.
“Yes.”
“Stop it.”
“No.” I set the carafe down. “Charm is something I’m good at, Serenity. You’ve had a month of the bad side of me. Let me show you the other side.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to.” Plainer than I planned. “You’re not on a schedule anymore. Nothing about your evenings is forced. Which means I have to be worth them, and I haven’t had to be worth anyone’s evening in a long time.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“I find it amusing. And…you interest me.” It’s an understatement. I’ve thought of very little else since that first moment in the corridor.
Her heart trips, one beat catching the next. She covers it with another mouthful of the venison.
“How old are you?” she asks. No apology in it.
“Three hundred and six.”
Her spoon stops. “Holy shit. You were alive before—”
“Before your country. Before the language you’re swearing in ever picked up that accent. Yes.”
“Does it get boring?”
I turn my glass by the stem. “It did. For longer than you’ve been alive, it did.
” I leave it there. Because telling her that the boredom ended when I walked into that compound would lead to more questions.
She thinks a bored rich man heard a rumor about a drug and decided to try it.
What I was actually doing inside that operation stays between me, Crowe, and the Court.
Sharing it with her makes her as much a target as I am.
I change the subject. Vampire politics. Society gossip that I’ve managed to stay ahead of. She laughs, and I’m pleased, and she looks nothing like the pale creature I first saw in that compound.
Eventually, the attendants clear the last course. I send them out with a look, and when the doors close, I take the case from my pocket.
“What is that?” She frowns.
“A gift. Be still.”
I round the table behind her. Diamonds on white gold, two hundred years old.
I open the clasp and bring it down against her throat.
She goes rigid under it. Of course she does.
My hands and her throat have one history, and her body knows it.
I stay standing, my fingers at her nape, her pulse climbing under my thumb while I work the clasp.
I could put my mouth on that pulse. I don’t. I do the clasp instead.
The stones settle over the exact skin I’ve been drinking from for a month.
“There.” My voice comes out lower than I planned. I step around where she can see me. “It survived a revolution and an empress. It’s never looked better.”
She puts two fingers on the stones and works through it. “This isn’t what I expected, Bastien. I don’t know what to do,” she says quietly.
“Neither do I. We can be confused together.”
“Okay.” She nods. “Okay… Do you play cards?”
“Cards?” I frown.
“Yes. You look like a gambling man.”
I chuckle. “Serenity Sangrey, you have no idea.”
I send for a deck, and we play at the small table by the fire, close enough that her knee is a hand’s width from mine.
Poker. Five-card and she plays it hard, folds early without regret, bluffs with a dead-level face, takes my money in buttons. And it feels good. Because she could have chosen to go to her room early, and she chose to stay here instead.
“Where did you learn this?” I ask after she’s beaten me yet again.
“My grandmother. Sundays, after the stew.” She rakes in the buttons with a flourish that says she’s enjoying this. “She said cards show you who a man is when he thinks it’s only a game.”
“And who am I?”
“Losing,” she says.
I laugh again. I am not accustomed to laughing. “Is that so?”
I win the next two hands. In the third, I fold a pair I should have played—half out of kindness—and she stops with her cards in the air.
“Don’t you dare.” Her eyes come up, hard. “Don’t you dare let me win. Play me for real, or we don’t play.”
“For real, then.”
I beat her twice more, honestly. She scowls at the buttons and demands another hand, and wins it clean, then takes everything on the table. She sits back with the firelight on the diamonds, one fist raised an inch off the table.
I can’t remember when I enjoyed poker so much.
I walk her up at midnight, past the family in their oil frames, and at the door she stops and turns. Her chin lifts. Her hands settle at her sides. Her head tips, just barely, the throat offered above the diamonds.
“Good night, Serenity.”
She blinks. “You haven’t—” Her hand rises to the stones. “Don’t you…?” She trails off.
“No.” I take her hand out of the air. I bend and press my mouth to her knuckles, and hold there, her pulse tapping under my lips, her scent rising off the inside of her wrist, my fangs aching down their full length in their sockets.
I pause there a moment too long. Then I straighten and give her hand back.
“If I ever do again, it will be because you offer.”
She stares at me. “Because I— Why?”
“Because too much has already been taken without your consent.” I step back. “And because I don’t want anything you don’t hand me. Good night. The house is yours till dusk. Sleep past noon. Terrorize my kitchen.”
I’m four steps down the gallery when her voice comes after me.
“The stew has to be her recipe. I’ll write it down.”
I don’t turn around, because my face is doing something I haven’t authorized. “Sunday,” I say, and keep walking.
The study fire is banked. I pour a brandy I won’t drink and stand at the hearth.
Her throat is safer tonight than it’s been in a year. It’s also entirely out of my reach. Unless the thirst takes over.
But it won’t.
I’ll make sure of it.