Page 141 of Bought for Blood

Serenity

The house ticks now. When they brought me here in a locked car, this house was silent. Every clock in it had been stopped for longer than I’d been alive. We’ve been winding them in the evenings, two or three at a time, him carrying the keys and me doing the winding because I like the feel of it.

The house is filling up with small sounds. Yesterday I stood in the gallery and listened to four different clocks disagree about the time, and I laughed until I had to sit down on the stairs.

Nobody locks anything anymore. I checked. On my first morning back, I went along the corridors and tried every door I was never allowed through. Every one of them opened. Most of the rooms were furniture under sheets.

“You could have just asked me,” he said, watching me from the end of the hall.

“I didn’t want to ask. I wanted to try the handles.”

He didn’t say anything to that. He’d understood it before I finished saying it.

Grace and Decker come at the end of the first week.

I hear the car from the front steps, and I hear Grace’s door open before the car has properly stopped. Then she’s got both arms around me and her face in my neck, and for a while neither of us can talk.

Decker gets out slowly and stands by the car with his head back, taking in the whole front of the house.

“Big place,” he says.

“Wait until you see the dining room.”

Marthe takes one look at Decker’s empty plate and adopts him on the spot. She brings out a roast that was meant to last the staff two days, and he works through it steadily. Every time his plate empties, Marthe is already crossing the room.

“At last,” she says to me, watching him start on the third helping. “When is he coming back?”

Bastien and Decker barely spoke to each other at the door. Decker looked at him for a moment without saying anything. Then he put his hand out, and Bastien took it, and that was the whole conversation.

Now Decker eats, Grace talks, and Marthe ferries dishes, and Bastien sits very quiet at the head of his own table. He’s not drinking anything, and he’s not talking, and he doesn’t look away from any of it.

I know what I’m looking at. It’s been a very long time since this room was used for anything but a performance.

After lunch, Grace and I walk the gallery, past all the dead people on the wall. She stops at the worst of the portraits and pulls a face at it. Then we sit on the window seat at the far end with our feet up.

“So,” she says.

“So.”

“You’re staying.”

“I’m staying.”

She looks out the window. The lawn is white and unmarked all the way down to the trees.

“I had a whole speech,” she says. “I worked on it in the car. Decker heard it four times.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“No. It fell apart around the second hour.” She looks at her hands. “It was mostly about how you’ve only known him a few months, and how you’ve been through something huge, and how nobody should decide their future in the state you’re in.”

“That’s a good speech.”

“It’s a great speech. There’s one problem with it.” She turns and looks at me straight. “My wolf chose Decker before I’d said ten words to him. And if anyone had stood in front of me with a speech, I’d have walked through them.”

“Grace—”

“Wolves attach once.” She says it quietly. “That’s real, isn’t it? That’s what this is.”