Page 34 of Bought for Blood

I straighten. The skin at her throat is smooth. The bruise pales while I watch, the green washing out until her skin holds one clear color again.

“That will never happen again,” I say. And then: “I’m sorry.”

She’s staring at me again. “You’re sorry,” she says, and waits for the catch.

“Yes.”

“You bought me. You feed on me. And you’re sorry.”

“It appears so.”

I came here to feed. It’s two steps away now, healed, warm, mine by contract, and everything about this feels wrong. I look at her throat, and my appetite stands down without being told.

That has never happened.

“We’re done for tonight,” I say, and take my coat from the chair.

“You didn’t—” She stops. Her hand goes back to the smooth new skin. “You paid to feed.”

“I know what I paid for.” I pull the coat on. “The house will bill me in full. Tell them I said so.”

The guard straightens as I pass him. Down the stairs, out through the doors, and the cold outside means little to me. Yves has the car open. He looks at my face once and gets in without a word.

Floodlights drop away behind us. The road turns to forest.

The insult.

That’s what tonight was. A man in my position doesn’t let a slight like that stand. The contract violated, renting her out the moment my back was turned. Any Seigneur would have done the same. It was the insult.

Chapter 13

Serenity

The guard who walks me out of the ward doesn’t touch me. A year of hands on my arms, and tonight he keeps his distance and holds doors open instead.

“Where are we going?”

“Up.”

“Up where?”

“You’ll see it when you’re in it.”

We go up two floors, past the level with the warm room, into a corridor with actual windows. Dark glass, wire in it, but windows. I count six of them. Then the guard stops at a door and knocks, and the door opens from the inside.

“Mrs. Brown?” I blink at the supervisor.

“Come in.” She stands aside to let me past. “Give her the key card and get out,” she tells the guard. “You’re tracking ward stink into my hallway.”

He hands me the card. Me. Then he’s gone. Mrs. Brown shuts the door, and I’m standing in a room I don’t understand.

A bed. A real bed, wide, with a white cover and two pillows. A lamp burning yellow on a table. A chair by the window, a radiator ticking under it, and the air is warm everywhere, all the way to the corners. There’s a rug. Through an open door I can see white tile and a bathtub.

A bathtub.

“Sit down before you go down,” Mrs. Brown says. “I don’t need you cracking your head on my floor. That’s trouble neither of us wants.”

“Whose room is this?”