Page 22 of Bought for Blood

“Not yours to hear. I’ll give them to the woman herself.”

Crowe checks his watch. It’s the first thing he’s done all evening that wasn’t deliberate.

“Convenient,” he says. “They’re sitting tonight.” He stands and takes his coat off the hook. “I’ll drive. You’ll wait while I call ahead, because even you don’t walk in on the Court unannounced. And, Val-Serein…” He pauses at the door. “Whatever this is, keep it out of that room. She’ll find it if you don’t.”

He drives without wasted motion, the same as he does everything else. Neither of us talks, not over the river, not through the city center. I watch the tower come up through the windshield, its private floor dark against the lit ones below.

The Court doesn’t meet in castles anymore. It meets where the money is. And a stock exchange sees more than most.

Crowe badges us through a garage, rides the elevator with me as far as the anteroom, and stops there.

“This is where I wait,” he says. “I work near her. Not for her.”

“You’ve mentioned.”

“It bears repeating in this building.”

The chamber takes the whole north face of the floor, glass on three sides, the city laid out underneath and none of its light reaching in. A long table of black wood, centuries older than the tower, shipped from wherever they sat last. The room smells of old blood and new carpet. The blood is ceremonial. The carpet cost more.

Sixteen seats filled tonight, and not one chest in the room rises and falls. I know most of the faces, which is to say I knew them under their previous names. Ysabelle Faine presides fromthe middle of the long side. The head of the table is where challengers aim, and she stopped sitting within reach of that longer ago than anyone at this table can remember.

Dark hair touched silver. Hands folded on the wood in front of her. She was old when I was made, and nobody living knows by how much. Whatever age sits in that chair stopped being a number a long time ago. I feel it in the room before she ever speaks.

The contested seat at her left holds Mattia Valdieri, and he holds it carefully. Young for this table. Young enough that I sometimes hear him breathe, when he forgets he doesn’t need to. He watches me cross the room, weighing me the way a man does when he assumes everyone is a rival.

“Sébastien-Laurent de Val-Serein.” Faine’s voice is mild. It’s always mild. “Crowe says you’ve been inside. The Court will hear it.”

I stay standing. Sitting at that table means I’m entering her circle. I left it a long time ago.

“Ask,” I say.

A ripple down the table. Faine’s hands don’t move.

“The facility. How large?” she says.

“Built for forty. Holding around twenty.”

“Holding what?”

“Witch, mostly. Some shifter stock. Everything either hybrid or magic-blood.”

Faine’s eyes narrow. “Syndicate sourced. As we suspected.”

“And the product?” This from a heavyset lord halfway down whose name has changed more times than anyone bothers tracking anymore. “How does it move?”

“Daily extraction, sold down in volume. Private sessions upstairs for anyone with the price of the door. The house is mortal-fronted and competent, but I’d say they don’t know whothey’re working for. The manager takes quotas from a superior he’s never seen.”

“Then the house is a branch,” Faine says.

“One of several, or the volume makes no sense. Stock is committed upward—standing arrangements, designations reserved for buyers the house can’t name. Somebody sets the quotas. Somebody sets the prices. Trace the committed stock far enough, and it ends at one destination. That’s who you’re looking for.”

“How long?”

“Till I find out who we’re dealing with?” I shrug. “Hard to say. Weeks. Months. A house like that doesn’t trust a buyer until they become a regular.”

“And your method?” Valdieri, leaning in. The right question. I note it.

“I go in as what I am. I buy what a buyer buys. I do what a buyer does.”