Page 102 of Bought for Blood

“And if I don’t?”

“Then four of us hold you, and it goes in anyway.”

His heart is fast. He’s close enough that I can hear it, and under the tobacco he smells like a frightened man. I have to sit very still while he holds that cup out.

I drink it.

It’s the same as the glass in the lounge. Blood with something underneath. The heat comes up my arms and settles, and the strength goes out of them.

He’s barely closed the door before it opens again, and Ecaterina comes in carrying her own chair.

She sets it facing me, sits, and opens a notebook on her knee. She’s dressed the way she was in the lounge, and she looks like she’s slept.

“Good evening,” she says. “You’ve been out for a day. You were not harmed in that time; you were unconscious, and we had ground to cover.” She clicks her pen. “I told you my two questions. Let’s start with the first one. What has been traced beyond the building we met in?”

“The only thing I could tell them about was the building that you emptied.”

“That’s not an answer. You spent time inside our operation with the Nocturne Court behind you and Aurora beside it. I needto know what they’ve mapped. Which of our other houses. How far up. What your Court plans to do about it.”

“You have a source inside Aurora. Ask them.”

“My source is on the wrong side of that mountain.” She says it without any embarrassment. “They can hand me a raid plan. They can’t tell me what your Court knows, or what your Court will do next. You can. You’re the only person in my hands who’s sat in both rooms.”

“Then you know what I’m worth, and you know better than to make me useless.”

“Nobody is going to hurt you tonight.” She turns a page. “The other houses. Which ones do they know about?”

“I never saw another house. I asked your manager to show me more stock, and that’s when he arranged the meeting with you. I suspect there’s a lot more to see.”

“My manager is the least of what you saw.” She writes something. “The paperwork that travels with a sale, then. Has anyone outside this operation seen it?”

Vanya’s blank form, sliding down the table toward me.

“I signed it,” I say. “I didn’t study it.”

She writes that down too. She doesn’t look annoyed. She doesn’t look anything.

“Let me try it another way,” she says. “The delivery schedule your Court was given—the corridors, the timings. How much of it did they keep, and how much did they hand to Aurora?”

“You’d have to ask the Court.”

“I’m asking you.”

“And I’m telling you I carried a map to one meeting, put it down, and answered questions about fences. What the Court keeps and what the Court shares is decided by people above me.”

“You’re a Seigneur. There is no one above you.”

“There are three, and one of them is Faine. You’ve been selling to my kind for years. You should know how little we tell each other.”

She’s patient. She never raises her voice. And she has time, which is the one thing I don’t.

Somewhere in the second hour I say, “You have a good hand.”

The pen keeps moving. “I beg your pardon?”

“Your handwriting. They taught that in convent schools in the east until about 1960, and almost nowhere since. Most people let it go.”

“The other houses, Seigneur.”