Page 54 of Bought for Blood

I wake at ten with the sun through the shutters I left open, and I lie still and wait for the dream to evaporate.

It doesn’t. I’m in a bed with sheets that are probably silk, and pillows stuffed with goosedown.

“This is surreal,” I whisper.

So I run last night through from the start: dinner, diamonds, cards, a kiss on the knuckles, a door he walked away from. He didn’t take anything. Nobody came in the night. The necklace is on my nightstand, worth more than he paid for me.

How much did he pay for me?

I push it aside and focus on what matters.

I woke up warm and fed, and nobody has hurt me. I don’t know how to process that. Cruelty I can plan around. Kindness I don’t understand anymore.

So I get up and do the one useful thing. I plan my day.

Breakfast arrives while I’m dressing, carried by the driver from yesterday. Gray hair cropped short, steady hands. He sets the tray at the window table and pours the coffee without being asked.

“You drove the car,” I say.

“I did, mademoiselle. I am Yves. I keep the Seigneur’s house, drive him, and do whatever else wants doing.” He sets the pot down. “The kitchen wasn’t sure how you take it.”

“Just like that.” I sit and breathe it in.God. Real coffee.I’d forgotten. “Where are we?” I ask.

“Somewhere very safe, mademoiselle. Will you take cream?”

He says it with the pot already tipped, and I look at him.

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“I answered the one that matters, mademoiselle. Cream or no?”

“We drove two hours yesterday. West, mostly. I had the sun on my side of the car. That puts us—”

“That puts you at breakfast,” Yves says, “with your eggs going cold. Will there be anything else?”

“How long have you worked for him?”

“A long time.”

“Long enough that it shows,” I say. I watch his face. It stays blank. “You’d have been young when you started.”

“I was, mademoiselle. It didn’t last.” A shallow bow. “The house is yours to walk. The kitchen is down the west stairs, and they’ll be glad you’re here. Cooking for one man who doesn’t eat wears on their pride. If a door is locked, it’s storage.” He pauses at the door. “The front door is open to you.”

“How far can I go?” I ask.

“To the boundary, mademoiselle.”

“And beyond that?”

“Beyond that is not safe.”

He goes. I drink the coffee. It’s better than anything I’ve tasted in my life.

They’re too good at this. You don’t train staff to stay quiet by accident. I eat my breakfast and stop thinking about it, because everything is good and I feel like I’ve been hungry forever.

The house takes me all morning to explore, and it tells me more than Yves did.

It’s enormous. Corridors forty doors long, a library two floors tall with a ladder on rails. Everything is clean and waxed and tended. Almost none of it is lived in. I open door after door on furniture under white sheets, on beds stripped to their frames, on a music room where the piano is shut, and the stool is pushed all the way in. Nobody plays.