Page 26 of Bought for Blood

“You could have let me fall.”

“That would be disruptive,” he says.

Level voice. An observation, no more. But he hasn’t moved back to his chair, and the glass is upside down by a decanter he hasn’t opened, and the mud on his shoes has been drying since before I walked in.

“Two days,” I say. “Wherever you were, whatever put that on your shoes—you didn’t stop to change. You came straight here.”

He turns his head toward me. I make myself finish it.

“You needed this.”

He doesn’t confirm it. He doesn’t deny it either. He crosses to the door and opens it.

“The bite has healed,” he says, to the corridor, not to me. And he’s gone. His footsteps go down the hall, and then the sound is gone too.

I sit in the chair with his handkerchief lying by the decanter where he left it, and my legs shaking for reasons I’m no longer sure are just about the bite.

My wolf keeps her eyes on the door.

I get up on the second try, cross the room, and bang on the door for the guard.

Chapter 10

Bastien

The bidding is at ninety thousand, and I lift two fingers off the arm of my chair—a hundred and twenty—for the pleasure of watching Herrick’s face fall.

The lot is a silver wren in a silver cage, made by a Geneva watchmaker two hundred years ago for a queen who died before it was delivered. Wind the key and nothing happens—the mechanism seized up longer ago than anyone alive can remember. Nobody knows how to repair it, but I don’t care. I want it.

Herrick bids one thirty. I go to one sixty without waiting for the auctioneer to find me. Somewhere to my left, someone laughs low into their glass.

“One sixty,” the auctioneer says. “Against you, my lord Herrick.”

Herrick eyes me across three rows of the oldest predators on the continent. He’s weighing what the bird is worth against whatit costs to bid against a Val-Serein who’s decided to play. He folds his hands. The hammer comes down.

Scattered applause, the dry kind. A mortal attendant in house uniform carries the cage to the settlement table. The wren sways mute on its perch. I’m pleased out of all proportion to the object. It’s a dead bird I paid too much for. I don’t care. It’s mine now.

“A hundred and sixty thousand, Bastien?” Odile arrives at my shoulder with two glasses and gives me one. “For a bird that doesn’t sing.”

“It sang for a queen.”

“She died before it ever sang for her. You know the provenance better than I do.”

She settles into the chair beside mine as the next lot comes out—a saint’s fingerbone, allegedly, in an ornate setting worth more than the saint. The young man who poured her champagne is already back at her elbow, refilling a glass that’s nearly full, and she doesn’t send him away. Fair, decorative, entirely unnecessary. She’ll have forgotten his name by the time she sends him home before dawn, and he doesn’t yet know that.

“It’s a fake,” she says, not looking away from the floor. “Third one I’ve seen sold as real this decade.” Odile spends more time at these evenings than I do, and she watches the room. “At this rate that saint had a dozen fingers. I’ve seen two of the real ones.”

“I’m not interested in the finger. I got my bird.”

“You outbid Herrick for the pleasure of it. I watched you do it.”

“Herrick’s face was worth eighty of the hundred and sixty.”

“Mm.” She drinks. Her eyes stay on me over the rim, pale gray, older than the building. “Do you know what you were doing the last time I sat beside you at one of these?”

“Improving the average of the company.”

“You were checking your watch every four minutes and sighing between lots.” She sets the glass down on the arm between us. “Tonight you’ve bid on four lots, ruined Herrick’sweek, and corrected the auctioneer’s Latin. You’ve been dead behind the eyes for decades. Tonight you’re not. Whatever it is, keep doing it.”