Page 5 of Bought for Blood

“Not in anything the Court has offered recently. No.”

He watches me. I let him. The coals pop in the grate. Somewhere below us, a tap runs briefly and goes quiet.

“You’re here to involve me in something I’ll regret,” I say.

“Probably.” He doesn’t blink.

“At this hour. Without calling.”

No call. No time to prepare a story. Whatever this is, it moved faster than he expected too.

“If I’d called, you’d have said no already,” Crowe says.

I push off the shelf and cross to the fire. I set my glass on the mantel, then crouch and feed two logs onto the coals. The wood catches. This close, the fire actually warms my face for the first time tonight.

“What do you want, Crowe?” I say it to the fire.

“I have something you might find interesting.”

I look over my shoulder at him. “You always think you do.”

“This time I’m right.”

I stand and brush my hands off on my trousers. Crowe lifts his chin and tracks me across the room.

“Eighteen months,” I say. “Since the Cassar business. The last time you sat in that chair.”

“I remember.”

“You broke my banister.”

“Hebroke your banister.” Crowe’s fingers tap once on the chair arm. “I broke him. The banister was incidental.”

“Seventeenth-century ironwork. The man I hired to restore it was profoundly irritated. What kind of proposal do you have for me, Crowe?” I pick up my wine from the mantel where I left it.

He shifts his weight forward, forearms coming down onto his knees. “Something that needs your reputation. Your standing. Someone willing to walk into a room full of people doing exactly what the Court wants stopped.”

“The Court wants a great many things stopped.”

“This one Faine wants stopped. Personally. And she’d prefer that it stays between us.”

She doesn’t ask for things the easy way. This one, she can’t even put her name on.

“My reputation,” I say. I move back toward him, slowly, and lean on the edge of the table rather than taking the chair. “Which one? I’ve built more than one.”

“The one where you spend freely on things most people won’t discuss at dinner.” Crowe looks up at me.

“That reputation is well earned.”

“That’s why it works.”

I turn the glass in my fingers. The wine catches the new firelight, deeper now, moving.

“You’re not going to tell me what this is,” I say.

“Not tonight.”

“But you want an answer tonight.”