Page 70 of Bought for Blood

I get back into the bed on the window side, between him and the curtains. My hand goes over the cloth on his and stays there.

Behind the shutters, the light keeps coming up. I don’t sleep.

Chapter 24

Bastien

The mark on my hand hasn’t closed. I’ve had a blade through this palm. I had a horse come down on it outside Lyon, and the bones knitted before the animal was up.

Everything I have ever done to this body has healed inside the hour. This split runs from the knuckle to the wrist bone, and it’s been open for three days, brown at the edges, pink in the middle. When I flex my fingers, the skin pulls.

Only one thing marks my kind like that. It doesn’t come through shutters by itself.

I woke that evening into a room sealed tighter than I’d left it. The curtains had been dragged past each other. A blanket was pushed along the floor under the hem, worked in hard, the full width of the wall. My jacket was stuffed into the gap at the frame, and there was a print in the dust on my desk where somebody had stood to reach the rail.

So she opened it, then she closed it, then she went round that room on her knees in the dark making certain it couldn’t happen twice.

She had my life in her hands for as long as it took to decide something; she gave it back, and now she doesn’t want me to know she did.

I’ve nearly asked her a dozen times since: at the table, in the gallery, last night with her asleep on my arm. I put it down every time. She’d lie to me, she’d know I knew, and I’d have made her do it for nothing.

She asked me once whether anything had ever marked me. I said no. That was true when I said it, and now there’s a scar on my hand that she put there, and I’d take it again tomorrow.

She’s in the library when I come down, feet up under her in the chair by the ladder, one of my books open on her knee.

“You’re reading my Montaigne.”

“I’m not reading anything. It’s in French.” She turns it round to show me the page. “Somebody argued with the whole first chapter in the margins.”

“Somebody was twenty-six and insufferable.”

“You.”

“Me.”

“Then translate it.”

“Absolutely not.”

That gets her off the arm of the chair laughing, and when I hold my hand out for the book, she takes my wrist instead and turns my hand over. She looks at the mark for a long moment. Her heart rate climbs. Her expression doesn’t change.

I make myself wait.

“Does it hurt?” she says.

“No.”

“Will it go?”

“It will fade.”

Her thumb moves once across the edge of the split. Then she puts the book into my hand, and she’s already walking when she says, “Come up, then,” and she doesn’t look back to see whether I will.

I go up.

The dress is off before I’ve shut the door. She comes at me, and I take her mouth, and she opens under it. I get her back against the bedpost with my hand spread on her stomach, and she is warm everywhere. That’s the thing I have no answer for. Not the blood. The heat coming off her—her arms, her throat, her thighs—all day, without her doing a single thing to make it.

I hold my palm there until it stops being cold.