17. Chapter 17
Kalli
I expected offices. Desks, hallways, a man behind a window checking a list. The primary outpost of the Aurora Collective is nothing like that. The road runs into the side of a mountain. Steel doors seal behind the truck. Then there’s a hall cut from rock, with warm light in it.
People live here. It isn’t a building people only work in.
“You look surprised,” Gideon says.
“I thought it would be a facility.”
“Everyone does, the first time.”
I peer around, taking it all in. There are things living here that are not entirely human. I pick up the scent of wolves. The prickle of magic. Entities that appear human but have more beneath the surface.
And then there’s something else. A woman is waiting where the passage opens out. Small. Blond hair loose. A man stands behind her shoulder with one hand near her back.
I know her face.
They walked her past my cell every morning. Each time, I got half a second of her from the side. Blond hair, hollow cheeks, a jaw held very straight. She never once looked frightened.
“You’re smaller than I thought,” I say.
She stops walking.
“Kalli?”
“Serenity Sangrey. You’re definitely smaller. You sounded taller through the wall.”
Her hand comes up over her mouth. Then she’s across the floor and into me. Her arms come around me. I hold her too, even though it doesn’t come naturally to be this close to someone anymore.
“They moved you,” she says into my shoulder. “I got out, and I told them everything I knew. Your cell number. The hallway. I gave it to Crowe the same night.”
“I know. He found me.”
“I kept thinking they’d move you again before he could reach you. Or that you’d fight them and they’d stop being careful with you.”
“I did fight them.”
“Of course you did.” She pulls back and looks at me. Her eyes are wet. She wipes at them hard with the back of her wrist, twice. She laughs. It comes out cracked. Mine isn’t much better.
The man behind her steps forward. He’s dark-haired and lean and better dressed than anyone else in the hall, and he moves like a man who has never had to hurry.
“Bastien,” he says.
I look at him. The man who came to see us in the hallway at the facility. Who came to choose one. He chose Serenity.
“You’re him.” My eyes narrow.
“I am.” He doesn’t apologize.
“You drank from her.”
The room around us stays quiet. Serenity doesn’t move.
“I did,” he says. Still not apologizing.
“I told her you’d get bored eventually. That you’d either drain her one night or hand her back down the pipeline when she stopped being interesting.”
“You told her that because it was the sensible expectation.” He holds my eyes. “You were right to say it. I’d have said it to her myself.”
“And?”
“And I didn’t do either of those things.”
“He didn’t,” Serenity says quietly. “There’s a lot more to it than what we expected. I’ll tell you all of it. But not right here. Not tonight.”
I look at his hand. It sits at the small of her back. It hasn’t moved once since he stepped forward. She hasn’t shifted away from it either.
I’ve spent a year reading people from the wrong side of bars. She isn’t simply tolerating him. They’re together.
Well, hell.
“All right,” I say. “Not tonight.”
“Thank you,” he says.
“That wasn’t for you.”
He smiles as if that doesn’t bother him at all.
“Come,” he says. “There are people who wish to see you.”
They take me further in, to a hall built for gatherings. Long tables have been pushed back against the walls. Today the room is full of people standing in tight groups, talking low.
Then I feel them. Dry heat that isn’t coming from the fire. Stone under it. More than one source, from three directions at once.
Dragons.
My spine locks before I’ve found a single face. The last room I was in with more than one dragon in it, I was drugged and naked on a bed.
I make myself breathe. Nobody here is looking at my hips. Nobody here is pricing me at all.
Two men come away from a group. Same height. Same dark hair. The same face, except one of them smiles on the way across the floor and the other doesn’t.
Twins.
“Caleb Craven,” says the one who reaches me first. “My brother, Dorian. That’s Ysabelle Faine by the window, of the Nocturne Court.”
The woman at the window doesn’t turn around. Tall and narrow, in a dark suit cut close, her hair pulled back so tightly it looks like it might give her a headache. She’s the only person in this hall who hasn’t looked at me since I came through the door.
“Kallista Ondrathe. Heir of the Aldrake, of the Eyrie Seat.” I announce it while wearing a vampire’s shirt with the cuffs rolled twice. Nobody laughs.
The room goes quiet.
“Say that again,” Caleb says.
“Heir of the Aldrake.”
“The Aldrake seat is recorded as fallen.” He says it carefully. “Two hundred years. There’s a story about it. The last of your line flying into a storm off the north face and never coming down. I heard it at a fire as a boy.”
“That isn’t what happened. We went quiet on purpose. We’ve been hidden for two hundred years.”
“I believe you. I’m telling you what every clan on this continent believes.” He doesn’t soften it. “They don’t think your people are hiding. They think you’re extinct.”
I knew we were hidden. Nobody ever told me the rest of the world had buried us and made up a story about it.
“Not everyone thinks we’re gone,” I tell them.
Caleb raises an eyebrow. “How so?”
“Gideon just pulled me out of a facility where they planned to breed me. They knew exactly what I was.” My jaw tightens. Someone pulls in a breath.
“What?” Caleb’s brow furrows.
Dorian hasn’t spoken. He’s gone still. His eyes have narrowed.
Somebody puts a chair behind me. I sit down in it without noticing that I have.
A tall, steel-haired man crosses the room and stands in front of me, arms folded. “I’m Viktor Parlance,” he tells me. “Our Collective monitors this sort of activity. Tell us what happened.”
I start with the cells, because that’s where the useful part starts.
“A doctor came to me before they moved me on. He had a case and a tape measure. He measured my arms, my hips, and the width of my pelvis. He looked at my teeth. He asked how often I came into heat.” I keep my voice steady. “He was a dragon,” I say.
Everyone goes quiet.
“You’re sure of that?” Caleb says.
“I knew what he was the second he came through the door. And he knew what I was before he opened his case. He wasn’t guessing at my bloodline. He had it written down in front of him.”
Viktor says something low to the man beside him, and that man leaves the hall fast.
“After the doctor, they moved me to a house,” I say.
“Days in a truck. Mountains somewhere, that’s all I can tell you.
The man who runs it calls himself Renwick.
There’s a woman who runs the household, Mrs. Nell.
A man on the door called Hollis. Men outside.
It isn’t a prison. It’s a comfortable house with staff in it.
But it was just as bad as the cells that I came from; it’s where women were taken to produce babies for dying bloodlines. ”
“Renwick owns it?” Viktor asks.
“Renwick runs it. He never once spoke about himself as the one making the decisions. He spoke about clients. What the clients wanted. When the clients were expected.”
“How many women were in that house with you?”
“I never saw another one.”
“Then how do you know there have been any?”
“The closet in my room.” My hands have started to shake, so I sit on them.
“There were maternity dresses in it for every stage of pregnancy. The last few were for a woman nine months gone.” I look at Viktor and nobody else.
“Nobody buys a wardrobe like that for one woman one time. It’s been used before.
It’ll get used again as soon as they put somebody else in that room. ”
Nobody in the hall says anything at all.
Caleb’s jaw has gone tight. “And the buyer?”
“Ilmar Vex. He was the one Renwick brought in after they’d prepared me. But he didn’t last long.”
When I say Vex, the room changes.
“Ilmar Vex is dead?” Caleb says.
“I watched it happen. Crowe killed him in the room where that old pig planned to… I think you can guess what he planned to do to me.”
Every dragon in that hall turns to look at Gideon. He’s standing against the wall by the door. He doesn’t move.
“Then the Vex line has one male left,” Caleb says. “One. And he isn’t in a position to father anything.”
“Good,” says Ysabelle.
“That’s fourteen hundred years of a seat gone in one bedroom,” says somebody near the fire.
“It’s a bloodline of men who think they can buy women,” she says. “I’ll sleep soundly.”
Viktor still hasn’t sat down.
“I’m going to be straight with you about where this leaves us,” he says. “The Collective has nothing on any of this. No name, no house, no road. Until you walked in here tonight, nobody had told us that somebody is matching women to buyers with rare bloodlines and running it as a business.”
“Then open a file.”
“It’ll be open before you’ve left this hall.
” He doesn’t make it sound like a favor.
“What I can’t give you is speed. Everything you’ve told me tonight came from one person, and one person is where we start, not where we finish.
We need the road, the house, the doctor, and somebody prepared to corroborate this. ”
“How long?”
“It takes as long as it takes.”
“There’s a woman in that room by now.”
“Probably,” he says, and he doesn’t dress it up for me. “I’d rather tell you that than give you a date I can’t hold to.”
Nobody argues with him. Nobody offers me anything better. When I stop talking, the quiet in the hall is a different quiet than the one before.
“You should go home,” Caleb says. “Your clan needs to know you’re alive.”
I don’t want to go home.
“I…” I lick my lips. “I’m not sure that I should.”
Viktor blinks in surprise. “Why not?”
Because somebody in my clan put me in that facility. Going home means standing in a hall with all of them, being pleasant, not knowing which one it was.
How do I say that? I have no proof. After what I’ve been through, they might think I’m delusional anyway.
For one second, I think about asking if I can stay here. Then I look around the room. Dragons who aren’t my dragons. A vampire court that owes me nothing. A woman I care for who has her own mate and her own year of hell to recover from.
Every one of them would say no, kindly, and every one of them would be right. This isn’t their inheritance. It’s mine.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll go home.”
Saying I’ll go home is harder than it sounds. Nobody in the room notices. That’s fine. I didn’t say it for them.
“Crowe takes her,” Faine says.
It comes out already decided. Nobody asks him. Nobody asks me.
I look at him. He’s already looking at me. Neither of us says anything about it.
Dorian pushes back off the table he’s been leaning on and checks his watch.
“Are we close to finished? Juno is due any day now. She has run entirely out of patience with me, with this building, and with the concept of stairs. If I’m not home for dinner she’ll fly down here herself, and I believe her.”
“Go home, Dorian,” Caleb says.
“I’m going.” He stops beside my chair on his way past. “Congratulations on being alive. Genuinely. We don’t get enough good news around here.”
Then he’s gone through the door at speed. Two people laugh. Somebody starts talking again at the far end of the hall.
Serenity comes over.
“You’re quiet,” she says.
“I go home tomorrow.”
“That’s good.”
“It should be.”
She waits.
“Somebody in that clan sold me,” I say. “I still don’t know who. I’m going to walk into my mother’s hall and stand in front of every person I grew up with, and one of them sold me to blood dealers.”
She doesn’t tell me it’ll be fine. She’s the one person in this building who knows better than to say that.
“Bastien wants to go with you,” she says. “So does half of Aurora.”
“I don’t need an escort into my own clan hall.”
“You need somebody standing behind you who isn’t Aldrake. So that whoever did it sees a witness in the room before they see you.”
“You’re right,” I agree. That’s better than comfort.
“You’ve got Crowe,” she says.
“Gideon?” I say. “Yes. I have him.”
“How is that, by the way?”
“How is what?”
“Don’t.” She’s watching my face now, and she’s better at this than she was through a wall. “You said his name differently.”
“I said it the same as everything else.”
“You didn’t.”
“He’s the man who got me out of there. That’s all he is.”
“That’s a very short answer for a complicated question.”
I don’t give her a longer one. She lets it go, but she keeps the look on her face while she does it, and I know she’ll come back to it another day.
Outside, the trees move in the dark. Behind me, the hall is warm and loud. Everyone in it is already home.
Tomorrow I walk into mine. I’ll shake hands with the person who sold me. I won’t know it when I do.