Page 27 of Bought for Blood

“I’ve no idea what you mean.”

“No. Of course not.”

She lets it rest there.

The fingerbone goes to a collector from the eastern courts. A tapestry comes out next, then a case of letters from a dead emperor to a mistress history missed. I lift my fingers once for the letters, then let them go still on the arm of the chair when the bidding climbs past a young one who wants them badly enough to shake. Tonight I can afford to lose on purpose.

A server glides by with fresh flutes, pausing to check that we have enough in our glasses. Fair-haired, quick hands, gone again—and for a moment I’m not in this room.

Firelight instead of chandeliers. A fist of white cotton. A sound she tried so hard to stifle. And a taste I can’t get back, no matter how I reach for it.

The auctioneer says a number twice before I hear it. I’ve lost the thread of the lot entirely—a bronze something, already hammering down—and Odile is watching me with those pale eyes.

“That good, is it?” she asks.

“The champagne?” I swirl my glass. “It’s tolerable.”

“I’m not talking about the champagne, Bastien.” She taps her fingertip against her flute. “I’m talking about your distraction.”

“My attention span is not your concern.”

She rolls her eyes. “Ah, mon Dieu!Impossible man. I will extract it from you sooner or later. You know this.”

I shrug and turn back to the floor, aware that I’m sitting with my society’s elite while my attention is in a blood den two hours away.

I resent it. Whatever the taste of her does, it has no business affecting me this way.

“Lot forty,” the auctioneer says, and someone takes the chair at my other side without being offered it.

Cologne, applied wholesale. Under it, the wrong scent for this room: young blood, fed recently and badly. Turned, and not long ago by our measures, sixty years at the outside. New suit, new watch, restless in a way our kind seldom is.

My teeth clench.

“Lord Val-Serein. Sterling.” He holds out a hand. “We haven’t been introduced.”

“No,” I agree, ignoring the hand.

He laughs as though I’ve been witty. His eyes keep moving—the floor, the exits, the better seats—a creature monitoring a room he can’t read.

“That was a statement, that bird.” He nods toward the settlement table. “A hundred sixty for a broken trinket. I respect it. You’re a man who buys what he wants, doesn’t matter what the label says.”

“Yes,” I say, watching the auction.

“See anything else you like here?” he presses.

“Perhaps,” I say.

“Or would your real interests lie elsewhere?” He leans in, and his voice drops into what he believes is discretion. “The private houses. The specialty stock… I’ve heard of one that keeps vintages you can’t get anywhere licensed.” A pause, testing how that lands. “And they say you’ve been slumming, my lord. Drinking off the books.”

Putain.

It didn’t take long for word to get out.

“They say a great many things.” I keep watching the auction.

“Sure. Sure they do.” He laughs again, too loud for the room, the kind that wants an audience. “But between us…where would a man go to find something special?”

“You’ve mistaken me for a colleague.” I don’t raise my voice. I don’t look at him. “The error is understandable. You’re new, and from a distance we look like the same kind of thing.”