Page 47 of Bought for Blood

“She isn’t your stock. As of four minutes ago, she isn’t your anything.” I stand. “She’s told, in plain words, by someone with the sense to be civil about it. If she arrives at my gate afraid, I’ll want a written account of every hour of her morning, with names attached.”

“Of course. Of course, my lord.” He writes all of it. Then his pen stops on its own, and he looks at the schedule a moment longer than it needs. “And the house’s— That is… Your visits, my lord. The standing sessions. Shall I close the account?”

There it is. A buyer keeps buying. An owner has no reason to walk back through that lobby, and a man who does raises questions. I’ve compromised my cover.

You’re a fool.

“Keep the account open,” I say. “The house has other interests worth my evenings.”

“The house is honored.”

It changes nothing. There is one thing that matters tonight. And she’s upstairs, asleep behind a locked door. By tomorrow dusk, that lock will be on a door in my own house, and every key to it will be mine.

Vasile walks me down himself, past the night men and the doors. Outside, the floodlights have gone thin, and past the east fence the sky has started to gray at its lowest edge.

Dawn, not far off.

I stand on the steps and watch it a moment longer. Below, the car is running. Yves has one eye on the same horizon.

“We must hurry, my lord.” It’s one of the few times I’ve heard him anxious.

“Yes. She follows later.”

If the words surprise him, he doesn’t show it.

The car takes the access road. The compound slides away. The gray in the east climbs one shade while I watch it through the glass.

Chapter 18

Serenity

Mrs. Brown comes at nine with a dress over her arm and my future already decided.

“You’ve been sold.” She lays the dress across the bed and smooths it once, more care for the fabric than she’s ever shown anything breathing in this building. “Private buyer. You leave at noon. Eat your breakfast first; you’re to travel fed.”

“What?” I stare at her. Sold. Months of misery, and the sale itself takes four words from a woman who doesn’t look up from a hemline. “Sold to who?”

She gives me a look over the glasses that says I’ve wasted her time. We both know exactly who she’s talking about.

“Lord Val-Serein, girl.” She huffs as if it’s an imposition. “I hear he paid a small fortune for you.”

Val-Serein.

I let that sink in.

Nobody’s said his name to me. Not once, not officially. I know this man as intimately as I’ve ever known anyone. And I don’t even know his name.

“Go on, get ready. Wash. The dress should fit.” She sets a pair of shoes on the floor, brown leather, laces. “Shoes. You remember shoes.”

She takes a key from her pocket and unlocks the cuffs from both my wrists, two quick turns, before I’ve finished processing the shoes. She drops them into a lined case, the only thing in the room she handles carefully.

“House property,” she says.

I rub my wrists; they feel wrong without the weight. Light, in a way that’s going to take some getting used to.

I cross the room slowly. I’m leaving this place. But what am I heading to?

What’s ahead is a house I’ve never seen, belonging to a man whose moods I’ve survived for a month’s worth of feedings. With nobody around to watch. And while I never thought of anyone in this place as a friend, at least there was someone around.