Chapter 18
I'm not supposed to be in the east halls of the Vassard Mansion at night.
It's not a written rule. Nothing here is written. But the mansion has a rhythm—when the staff withdraw, when the lights bank low, which corridors go dark and stay that way.
Tonight I'm three hours past when a good little captive should be asleep, barefoot on cold parquet, because I can't sleep and my room has started to feel like the salt cellar and I'd rather risk the halls than lie there counting my own pulse.
Aamon had to go feed. He beat around the bush before leaving, seemingly uncomfortable telling me about his needs. I held up a hand and told him not to worry about it.
So I’m all alone.
No, says the warm low place behind my sternum, mild as anything. You're not.
I stop with one hand on the cold newel post. The voice. I've stopped flinching at it. That should probably worry me more than it does.
Go back to bed, it says. Not a command. Almost fond. Walking this house at night doesn't end anywhere good.
"And what would you know about it," I breathe, to an empty stairwell, to myself, to whatever this is.
It doesn't answer. It never answers the ones that would give it away. But it stays, close and quiet, the way a hand stays on your back in a dark room—and I notice, distantly, that it's the only thing in this house whose attention doesn't make my skin crawl.
So not alone… just bored. And curious.
Leopold's been different since the night I opened that door for him. Colder. He watches me over the rim of a cup that isn't coffee, the way you watch a tool you loaned out and got back with a crack in the handle—deciding whether you can still trust it with the job.
Maybe it’s all in my head. Maybe I’m paranoid that Leopold heard everything that happened between me and Aamon after my nightmare. Does he know? Does he care? It's been a week and a half and he still hasn't said a word about it. And Leopold not saying a thing is worse than Leopold saying it.
I’m almost waiting for him to leave me another cream cardstock note that I’ve been a bad captive and my food privileges have been revoked.
But all this wondering is making me crazy–so I've stopped sleeping and started walking. Learning the house that's learning me.
I pass one of the night staff on the back stair—a young woman with a tray, who lowers her eyes and stands aside.
Her sleeve slips as she does it, and there on the inside of her wrist: two small healed punctures, silvered at the edges.
I've trained myself not to look at them.
The whole house is staffed with them. Quiet, well-kept, marked, if you catch the light right.
I file her with the others and keep moving.
Then I hear something strange.
A room ahead, a door open a hand's width, gold light spilling across the floor. Not a cry. Not quite. Something lower, with too many emotions in it, and my body knows what I’m about to see because my brain can catch up.
I should turn around. Every instinct in my body is screaming to go the other direction.
I peek through the gap and into the room instead.
Leopold is sitting in a chair by the fire.
There's a woman draped across his lap—boneless, head tipped back against his shoulder, throat open to the room. A human woman I’ve never seen before.
A stranger, brought in from somewhere, for this.
Leopold's mouth is at her neck, his eyes closed, one pale hand spread flat against her sternum like he's holding something he doesn't want to spill.
I've tried to picture this. Since the restaurant, since the glass of dark liquid he drank like wine, I've tried to imagine what Leopold looks like when he feeds. I got it wrong every time.
I pictured a predator.
This is a communion.
His fingers move against her sternum, almost a caress. And she makes the sound again.
And I can't tell…
That's the horror of it, frozen in this cold hall with my hand over my mouth. I can’t tell if the sound is agony or ecstasy.
Her face is slack, eyes half-lidded and wet, mouth open.
She could be dying or she could be coming apart with pleasure and it’s—I understand it with a slow cold drop—both.
Leopold has made it both. Braided them together so tight that even the woman wearing that face couldn't tell you which one she's drowning in.
Is this… is this what Shandy has been doing? Is this why she got involved in the first place?
Leopold's eyes open.
He doesn't startle. Doesn't stop. He was never surprised—I understand that a beat too late—because he knew I was here before I did.
He lifts his gaze across the room and finds me in the gap of the door, and there's no shame in it, no being caught.
Just a slow, knowing heat, like I've arrived exactly on schedule.
I suck in a sharp breath and then cover my mouth to muffle the sound.
Then he puts on a show.
He knows what this looks like. He knows what he looks like—the firelight, the tenderness, the woman coming apart in his lap—and he tips his head to drag his mouth slow along the line of her throat, watching me the entire time.
His hand slides up from her sternum and closes over her breast, unhurried, deliberate, and she arches into it with a sound that isn't pain at all.
He never once looks away from me.
And something low in me pulls tight.
I hate it. I hate it instantly and completely, but it's already happening—my skin going hot, my pulse dropping somewhere it has no business being, my mind doing the thing I'd cut it out for doing–putting me in that chair, imagining what it would be to have his mouth at my throat, those hands, that terrible undivided attention.
Heat climbs my neck. My breath goes shallow.
And he feels it. He knows it. His expression shifts, the flicker of satisfaction, the corner of his mouth curving against the woman's skin because he can smell what he's doing to me from across the room.
That's what breaks the freeze.
I stagger back a step, my hand flying to my own throat, to the pulse hammering under my flushed skin. He watches me do it. He watches me want it and hate wanting it, and he lets me see that he sees, and then—gift-giver to the last—he returns his mouth to the woman's neck and lets me go.
I don't walk. I don't do the cool, unbothered exit I'd planned. I turn and I go, fast, down the dark hall with my heart slamming and my face burning, and I feel his attention on my spine the whole way, warm as a hand.
I make it back to my room and shut the door and lean against it.
My heart won't slow down. My skin's still too hot.
I press the backs of my hands to my cheeks and they come away warm, and I hate that, I hate every part of it.
I cross to the window and crack it and let the cold night air work on my face until I can breathe like a person again.
It takes a while.
When it's done—when the flush finally drains and I can think in a straight line—I'm left with the sinking realization beneath it.
All this time I'd told myself the marked ones in this house were willing.
That there were contracts, compensation, the polite fiction the whole supernatural world runs on.
Well, maybe the staff members are. Maybe the feedings are a part of their employment with the Vassard house. How the hell am I supposed to know.
But standing in that doorway, whatever was going on between that woman and Leopold… that wasn’t about a job.
That was something else entirely.
He doesn't need to worry about finding staff who feeds him. That's the terrible genius of him. He makes feeding feel like a gift.
He makes you want it.
I…
No. No, absolutely not.
∞∞∞
Nellie finds me at lunch two days later with a scribbled note and a face I don't like.
"From my mom," she says, sliding onto the bench across from me.
She doesn't take her food out. That's how I know it's bad—Nellie always eats.
"I asked her about the thing you told me.
The—" she drops her voice, glances around the dining hall, "—the feelings.
Not-yours feelings. The training thing where you couldn't tell where you stopped and he started. "
"And?"
"She knew what it was right away." Nellie turns the note over in her hands.
"It's got a name. She called it tethered magic.
It happens when two casters' power gets—linked.
Usually it's on purpose, part of a working, but it can happen by accident if two people's magic is in close contact enough, often enough, over time. "
Close contact. Often enough. Over time.
Shit…
Every training session for two months. His power reaching into mine, mirroring it, helping me contain it, our magic pressed against each other four days a week while he taught me to hold it and wield it.
"Okay," I say, careful. "So what does it do?"
"That's the part—" Nellie looks down at the note, scribbled down while her mom talked her through it on the phone.
"Once the tether sets, it stops telling the difference between what's owed and what's felt.
Debt and feeling run the same wire. What passes between them will be real. It won't always be theirs."
I sit with that.
It will be real. It will not always be theirs.
"So the feelings I've been getting," I say slowly. "The ones that come from nowhere."
"Might be real feelings," Nellie says. "Just—maybe not yours. Maybe his, coming across the wire. Mom couldn't tell how much or which ones. She said there's no clean way to sort it from the inside. That's the whole problem with a tether. You can't stand outside your own heart and check the labels."
I look down at my hands.
And then the thought I've been shoving down for days surfaces cold: then how do I know? How do you know any of it is mine? The wanting. The trust. The way my chest feels when Aamon says my name. How do I know I didn't catch it off him like a fever.