Page 20 of Bought for Blood

“And when he’s done playing?”

“You already know what he is. When he’s done playing, he’ll have no more use for you. It might not end well.”

“Vampires have rules,” I say quickly. “Even I know that. They’re not allowed to kill the people they—”

“Out there, maybe. Rules need someone to enforce them. Look around you. Do you see anyone keeping count of what happens to us, besides us?”

Nobody. That’s the whole design of this place. If a client with that much money took too much one evening, it would barely register as a loss.

I swallow hard. He could drain me to the floor of that pretty room, and nobody in this building would even slow him down.

Drain me…

I remember the feeling of his mouth on my throat, and my body—my stupid, warming body—picks exactly this moment to think about it again. Sitting in that chair. The heat rolling from the bite, spreading until there was no room left in me for anything else.

That’s what dying in that chair would feel like. Warmth, building past the point where I could call it fear. Then further. Whatever came after the last of it, I wouldn’t be there to feel it stop.

I press my knees together. Something low in me answers to the memory anyway, and I hate that it does.

Is that how I die? Wrapped in it, and half-willing?

“Whatever you’re thinking,” she says through the wall, “stop. You’ll make yourself crazy.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re breathing like prey.”

I make my breath slow down. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

Stop thinking about it. Stop.

“Don’t let it get to you,” she says, which is impossible. “He might just send you back to the line.”

“You’re not making it better.”

“Sorry.” She doesn’t sound sorry. She sounds like someone who’s never had to apologize for anything.

“Serenity,” I say abruptly.

“What?”

“My name. It’s Serenity. Serenity Sangrey.” It comes out rough. It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud since they took my clothes. “You’ve called me little wolf for a year, and they call me by number. If I go through that door some night and don’t come back, I want one creature in this building to know who I was.”

The wall is silent. When she speaks, the dryness is gone.

“Kalli,” she says.

“Just Kalli?” I ask. Naming things makes it harder to lose them. And everything is eventually lost here.

“The rest is a mouthful, and isn’t important right now.”

“I’m glad to know you, Kalli,” I say. And I mean it.

“Likewise,” she says. “And you’ll come back, Serenity Sangrey. Expensive things get taken care of. It’s the cheap ones they lose.”

“You’d better be right.”

“I’m old. I’m rarely wrong.” Her weight shifts down the wall as she settles. “Sleep, while you can. Whatever he wants with you won’t happen before dark. His kind don’t move well in daylight. That gives you until dusk to be rested and fed and worth the trouble of catching. Make him work for every scrap of you. It’s the one thing left that you can control.”