Page 64 of Bought for Blood

“I meant no offense—”

“You meant precisely what you said.” My teeth are down. I don’t hide them. I set my other hand on the table beside his plate. “She isn’t for sale. Say it again, in this house or any other, and I’ll take you apart in front of people whose opinion you value. Odile will tell the story for the next hundred years.”

“Bastien,” Odile says.

I straighten and take my hand off his chair. I go back to my seat and sit down. I pick up my glass.

“The apricot thing is very good, I’m told,” I say.

Rouvel leaves eleven minutes later. He’s gracious about it, and tense beneath it.

Serenity hasn’t moved. Both hands in her lap, her eyes on me. She’s been looking at me since I stood at his chair.

She saw the teeth. She’s seen them before, back at that place, pointed at a man who deserved them more. Tonight she saw them at a dinner table with a napkin in her lap.

Say something.

I don’t.

Three hundred years of knowing what to do in a room, and I sit in my own dining room with both hands on the arms of my chair.

“Well,” Odile says. “That’s the best evening I’ve had since the war.”

Théo and Julian reappear somewhere in the noise of Rouvel’s car leaving, cheerful and slightly worse for the billiards room. Odile collects them, an arm through each of theirs, a kiss for one and a swat for the other.

“Serenity,” she says, “would you be a dear and get my boys to the car? I doubt they’d get out of this place without a map.”

Serenity checks my face, nods at Odile, and leads them out, the pair of them noisy all the way down the hall.

Odile turns to me as I move to the fire. “You’ve kept a mortal at your table and watched her all night,” she says. “Should I be worried, or delighted?”

“Neither. She’s an investment.”

“Of course.” She puts her gloves on, one and then the other. “You’ve never once looked at an investment in your life. Not like that.”

“Odile.”

“I’m not going to say the rest. You know the rest.” She pulls the second glove straight at the wrist and looks up. There’s no amusement in her face now. “I’ve known you since before your accent settled. Do it with your eyes open. They don’t stay, Bastien. It doesn’t matter how hard we love them. Not one of them ever stays.”

“Good night, Odile.”

“Good night.” She kisses my cheek. “Send for me when you want to lie to me again. I enjoyed it.”

The door. Then her car, all the way down the drive, Théo’s laugh carrying back through the window the whole way. Then the house is quiet.

Serenity comes down from the gallery with her shoes in her hand.

“Célestine’s my favorite person in this house,” she says. “No offense to Marthe. Also, Théo thought the third portrait was you. It’s a woman.”

“Célestine would have adored you. She’d have taught you what to plant.”

“What would she have taught me to plant?”

“The flowers that killed her husbands.”

She laughs with her head back, barefoot in my hall, holding a pair of shoes.

“Tonight was…fun,” she says once she’s stopped.