Page 69 of Bought for Blood

I wake up cold on one side. The fire’s out. The room is black. It takes me a moment to remember whose bed this is and why my hip hurts.

He’s on his back with one arm out across the sheet. He’s gone. Properly gone. He drank deep and now he’s down somewhere I can’t reach.

My body’s been running on ward hours for a year, and it wants to be up, so I get up. My nightgown is on the chair where he folded it. I put it on and stand in the dark.

There’s a thin gray line along the bottom of the curtains.

Morning. It’s morning out there. My rooms are the only ones that let the light in, and they’re two floors away, and I don’t want to go back to them.

I go to the curtains.

I want to see which way this room faces. I want to know what’s under the window, whether there’s a road, whether there’s a wall. I’ve been exploring this house since the day I got here, and I never got to see this part.

I pull the curtain an inch, then pry the shutters apart a fraction. Light comes through the slats and lands across the sheet, over his right hand.

His skin turns gray. Then it splits.

He groans, low and hoarse, still fast asleep. His whole arm jerks in toward his body. Smoke comes off the back of his hand, thin and pale. The smell of it hits my wolf, and she comes up off the floor of me snarling.

No! No, no—

My hand slams the curtain shut.

I didn’t decide to do that.

I did not!

I’m across the room before I know I’ve moved. His hand has curled in against his chest. I get it in both of mine, and at first I can’t see the damage, then the wolf takes over, and I turn it over and look with her eyes.

A split across the back of it, black at the edges, three inches long.

Oh, my God!

There’s nothing I can do for it. Nothing to clean, nothing to bind that would mean anything on flesh like his. I put his hand down on his chest and pull the sheet up over the whole arm.

He doesn’t wake. He doesn’t do anything at all.

I go back to the window.

I put both hands on the curtains, drag them together, and hold them overlapped. There’s gray coming through at the bottom where the fabric ends short of the floor. That tiny sliver that first drew me here. I get the blanket off the foot of the bed and push it along the hem, all the way from one wall to the other, on my knees, working it into the gap with the heels of my hands.

Then I go along the whole wall with my fingers to find where else it comes through.

Two places. One near the frame, one at the top corner where a hook has come out. I take his jacket off the chair and wedge it into the first. For the second, I stand on the desk in my bare feet and hook the fabric back over the rail, and the papers he squared up so neatly go off onto the floor, and I leave them there.

When I’m done, there isn’t one line of light in the room.

I get off the desk. My hands are shaking, and I press them together until they stop.

What did you do, Serenity?

What the fuck did you do?

I could have opened it all the way. Stood back. Waited. By the time anybody came up those stairs, it would have been too late.

He had to have known that. All it would take was for me to get those shutters open.

He’s asleep anyway.