Page 19 of Bought for Blood

“Less than you’d think.” Something shifts against the wall. “I watched him walk that whole line from the far end. He barely noticed anyone. He stopped for you. Even though you were doing that flickering thing you do.”

“Flickering thing?”

“Yes. When you’re trying to be invisible.”

“It used to work,” I mutter.

“Still does, a bit,” she says. “Though this time it worked against you.”

“You think that’s why he picked me?” I think of violet eyes and cool fingertips on my skin. I shiver.

“Who knows,” she says. “Can never tell with addicts. Maybe he just liked the look of you.”

“But if he’s just an addict, why come to a place like this?”

“Slumming it, maybe? Seemed rich. Maybe he likes to see where it comes from. Or maybe he wanted to get his mouth on the source. Some vampires enjoy the whole experience.”

I think about the drug our blood becomes, somewhere past these walls, in bottles I’ll never see. I’ve had a year to wonder about it and never gotten further than wondering.

“You think that’s all he is? A rich addict?”

“I think that’s the simple answer, and simple answers are usually right.” Something in how she says it doesn’t sound like she believes her own rule this time.

Footsteps move down the hall as a guard does his rounds. We both go silent.

“What did he do to you in there?” she asks once he’s passed. “When they sent you to him. You came back quiet.”

My throat closes. “He fed,” I say.

I don’t go on, and I think she reads something in my silence. “All right,” she says, and lets it go.

I lie there with both blankets pulled to my chin. My thumb finds the crook of my elbow and rubs at tape that isn’t there anymore, back and forth over the scars. In my head it’s all firelight, leather, the sound I made.

My face goes hot. Some part of me can’t leave it alone.

“It didn’t hurt,” I say.

The wall is silent.

“That’s what I can’t—” I stop. Start again, quieter. “It was supposed to hurt. Everything in this place hurts. It was the opposite of that, and I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Ah,” she says.

“What do you mean ‘ah’?”

“He’s softening you.” Something shifts against the wall, adjusting position. “My kind hunt too, long before any of this. A dragon doesn’t drop out of the sky onto the first deer she finds starving and desperate. Starving meat tastes wrong, floods itself with fear until the blood is bitter. A good hunt lets the herd settle first. Feeds it, even, if she has the patience. Calm animals are sweeter.”

“He wants me sweet?” I think about how sweet my blood must have been while I was unraveling last night. I shut the thought down.

“I didn’t say I know what he wants. I said I know what patience looks like on something old enough to have plenty of it.”

“You think that’s why they took me off the list?”

“Could be. If he’s got a taste for taking his time, maybe he wants his next meal rested first.”

I shudder. “Great. Thanks for that.”

“I’ve never seen the use in softening things, little wolf. It doesn’t change reality. After a year in this place, you’d know that.”