Page 15 of Bought for Blood

My hand closes into a fist.

His handkerchief is clutched inside it.

Chapter 6

Bastien

The door closes behind her, and I look at my hand. It isn’t steady. There’s a tremor at the base of my fingers. Small. But there. I have held this hand steady through duels and deathbeds. It has never moved without my permission.

It just did.

I sit down in the chair she was sitting in. The leather holds the shape of her. I’m warm, actuallywarm, wrist to jaw, from what I took. The fire at my back has no connection to it.

Blood doesn’t do anything. Not like that.

Every time I have fed, blood has merely filled me. Hers did something. The first pull came up carrying a charge. It ran down my throat and out through every vein. My senses tore open. The candle flames flared at the edge of my sight. Her heartbeat filled the room. When she shifted in the chair, I heard the silk move against her skin.

Power. Hers. It came through the blood straight into me.

And then it was gone.

I already can’t remember the taste.

I reach for it, and it slides away, the same way her face slid off my memory in that corridor. I remember everything since my rebirth in this form. But twenty minutes ago is gone. Every pull tonight was the first pull. Even now, sitting here, wanting to remember, it aches low in my gut, the same place hunger sits.

Again.

I want it again.

I stopped myself tonight. That’s the part I keep returning to. I reached the point I’d set for myself, and my mouth stayed on her throat past it—one second, two—before I made it stop. Appetite has never argued with me in my entire existence. Tonight it argued.

That’s new.

I don’t care for it.

Her fight made it better. Her body gave in. She didn’t. Jaw locked. Eyes on the ceiling. Silent until she couldn’t be. I felt it against my mouth. I felt her hating it. The hating made it sweeter.

I enjoyed that. It doesn’t trouble me.

So what is she?

The Sangrey line. Vasile watched my face when he said the name, and now it sounds less like sales talk. I’ve fed on witches. I’ve fed on wolves. None of them lit up the drink. None of them hid from my own memory afterward.

Chemistry. Some quirk of a rare bloodline meeting what I am. Good. Chemistry can be dosed and priced, and money is the one thing I’ve never run short of.

“Clever,” I say to nobody. “They have a source that’s addictive, and they’ve built it so you can never have enough.”

Every dealer’s dream.

I leave it there. I don’t ask what else it could be.

Vasile is in the office with the false window, mid-sentence to an assistant. Whatever he reads in my arrival ends the sentence. The assistant is gone before I’ve fully entered the room.

“My lord.” He comes toward me. “I trust the evening was—”

“We’re discussing terms. You said we would.” I don’t sit. “Reserve her. Sole use, not priority. No one else drinks from her, or puts her in a session room, while this arrangement stands.”

A pause, a fraction long. He expected a satisfied client. This is something else, and he’s repricing it while I watch. “Of course, my lord. The house would be delighted to arrange a standing—”