Page 49 of Bought for Blood

I press my fist under my ribs where the guilt sits, hard, until it gives me room to breathe. I’m out. They’re still in there.

I’m coming back for you.

I don’t know how, but I’ll make it happen.

The road runs west, sun on my side of the car. I put my hand in the patch of light on the seat and leave it there, and when the patch slides with the curves I move my hand to follow it. Twohours of that. Fields give way to forest, forest to hills, all of it lit, all of it open. Every mile puts that old world further behind and brings the new one closer: me and the man who bought me.

He said he’d take care of me. He also told me that it lasts until he chooses otherwise. I believe both. That’s the trouble with him. I believe both.

The predator softens the prey before the kill.

The car slows in late afternoon. Iron gates, high as two men, swing open on a drive that runs a half mile through old bare trees, and then the house comes up out of them. I lean forward without meaning to.

Stone. Three stories of it, gray-gold in the low sun, wings running off both sides, a fountain in the turning circle. It’s older than any building I’ve ever stood in and bigger than the compound, and every single window is shuttered. Dozens of them, floor after floor, all sealed tight against the daylight. The sun pours down on it, and the house shuts it all out.

It’s beautiful.

It’s still a place I can’t leave.

The car stops. A woman in gray opens my door before the driver’s out of his seat. Older, straight-backed, human; my wolf finds her heartbeat and two more inside the house.

“Miss Sangrey,” she says, my actual name, said in a courteous voice, with a small bend of the head. “You’re expected. Mind the step.”

The front hall alone is bigger than the compound’s whole lobby. Warm and lamplit against the shutters, and the smells come at my wolf all at once: beeswax, woodsmoke, old paper, cut flowers in winter…Gardenia, I think. Stone that’s clearly old. Underneath them all, I pick up the mineral trace I’ve come to know.

He’s here.

Somewhere below or above, out of the light, asleep or not. His scent is already everywhere. I’m inhaling deeply without thinking about it because that’s what my wolf wants.

The woman in gray takes me up a staircase wide enough for six, along a gallery of dead nobility in framed oil paint, to a door at the southern end.

“Your rooms.”

Rooms?

The door swings open, and I suck in a breath. A sitting room with a fire already burning. A bedroom beyond it with a bed four of me could sleep in. A bathroom in white marble. And on the far wall, tall windows, shuttered like all the rest.

I cross and try one. It opens easily.

The shutters fold back, and the last of the afternoon comes straight in, low gold light down the length of the room, warm on the carpet, warm on my hands. I stand in the middle of it, not breathing. His whole house is sealed against this. My room opens to it.

“His lordship instructed that your shutters remain unlocked,” the woman says from the doorway.

“I… Okay,” I mumble.

“Dusk is at five,” she adds. “The Seigneur will receive you at six. Dinner comes up at seven. The kitchen’s been told what a wolf needs.” A pause, as if she’s deciding whether to say something. She says it. “The house is glad of a guest, miss. It’s been a long time.”

The door closes behind her. Just a handle, plain brass, nothing else built into it. No bolt, no card reader, nothing to lock me in with.

The silence is deep enough that I can hear my own pulse.

Whatever he actually is when nobody’s watching, I start finding out at six o’clock.

The light stretches long across the carpet, goes amber, starts to thin. The sun sinks toward the treeline and takes the warmth off my hands a degree at a time.

Below me, faint through the old floors, the house begins to move. A door. Water in pipes. Footsteps on stone, crossing toward the stairs.

Dusk is at five.