Page 137 of Bought for Blood

Serenity comes in as far as the middle of the room. Under the frost on her coat and the smell of gas on her hands, there is warm skin and clean hair. My whole mouth floods, and I turn my face away before either of them sees it.

“You told him about the trucks?” she says.

“All that we know so far,” Crowe says.

She turns to me. “He’s going to find her. Kalli. He promised.”

“Yes,” he says.

“Say it properly with him here to witness it.”

“I promise I’ll find her.” He looks straight at her. “It might take a year. It might take longer. I don’t know what I’ll find. I’m going anyway.”

“If anyone reaches her, it’s him,” I say.

“I really hope he can.” Serenity pinches her lips together.

“Right.” Crowe puts the hat on. “I’ll be at the bottom of the track for an hour. After that I’m on the road.”

He goes. I listen for his engine, and it doesn’t come, which means he’s going to sit down there in the dark until she tells him one way or the other.

Then it’s the two of us in an empty house.

“Go with him,” I say.

“No.”

“You were safe. You were inside a mountain full of armed people, with your sister and a doctor.” I put both hands on the back of the chair because they need somewhere to be. “There is a price on my head. There are men being paid to find out what I care about. You have driven six hours to stand here where anybody can see you.”

“We’ll get to safe,” she says. “First we’re doing the other thing. You put me in a car while I was unconscious and you gave me away. You didn’t ask me.”

“There wasn’t anything to ask.”

“There was one thing to ask.” It comes out of her hard enough to fill the room. Her eyes have filled, and she’s furious about that too.

I don’t respond.

“You didn’t want the answer,” she says. “If I’d said stay, you’d have had to be the one who decided. So you did it while I was asleep. That’s cowardice.”

“Yes.”

She stops.

“Don’t do that.”

“It’s true. Now go back to the mountain. It’s the safest place you can be.”

“No, it isn’t. There is no safest place.” She takes a step toward me. “Listen to me. The danger isn’t standing next to you. The danger is my blood, and my blood goes where I go. Aurora had me for three days, and I walked out of it past sixty armed people, because I can do that, because of what I am. If I can walk out, someone else can walk in.”

“Aurora is still a fortress.”

“Aurora is a truly bizarre collection of people in a hole in a mountain.” She keeps coming. “And you have more money than the Court. Walls can be bought. Guards can be bought. If safe is what you want for me, build it. Build it around both of us. That problem has a price on it, and you can pay it.”

She’s right, and she can see on my face that she’s right, so I give her the next one.

“Then hear all of it. I’m not a good man, Serenity. I bought you. I put a price on a woman and paid it and had you delivered to my house. I sat at a table with your sister and let her believe you were dead. I nearly killed you because I didn’t know when to stop feeding. You deserve better than the man who did those things.”

“Do you think I don’t know what you are?” She wipes her cheek roughly with the back of her wrist. She’s crying, and she doesn’t look away. “You handed yourself over for people you’d never met. I found you in that room, burned and dying, and you’d given them nothing. Only a good man does that. Everybody knows it except you.”