Page 76 of Bought for Blood

“You’re going out.”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Out.”

“You’re not going to tell me?”

“No,” he says. “I can’t.”

“Bastien…”

He stops at the foot of the bed. For a second, he’s the man from the kitchen table.

“Marthe will bring food up. Eat all of it. You’ll be dizzy for two days, and you’re not to use the stairs without someone on your arm.” He says it fast. “Ask her for anything you want. Anything at all.”

“You haven’t answered me.”

“I know.”

He puts two fingers under my chin and lifts my face, and he looks at the two marks on my throat. His jaw works once, tight.

“Stay in your rooms tonight,” he says.

“Why?”

He takes his hand back.

“Because I’m asking you to.”

Then he’s gone, and his feet go off down the corridor faster than a man walks.

He owns me. He still has somewhere he has to be. Somebody sent him a piece of paper, and he went cold inside eleven minutes.

I keep forgetting I’m just a tiny part of his world.

I get up. It takes two attempts. The floor tilts under me, and I hold the bedpost until it settles. Then I find his shirt on the chair and put it on. I get as far as the door with one hand on the wall.

The house has changed while I’ve been asleep.

There are lamps burning along the gallery that have never been lit before. Down in the front hall, a man I’ve never seen is standing by the doors with his coat on. He isn’t staff. Nobody in this place stands like that.

Marthe is at the bottom of the stairs with a tray in her hands, and she looks up and sees me on the landing in a man’s shirt with my hair everywhere.

“Back to bed with you,” she says. “I’ve been up those stairs four times today, and I’ll do it a fifth.”

“What’s happening down there?”

“Soup’s happening. Sit down before you’re on the floor.”

Then the front doors open, and I hear the car on the gravel. It goes off down the drive fast enough that the sound of it changes twice before it’s gone.

Yves comes to the foot of the stairs and starts up toward me with his hand out for my elbow.

“You shouldn’t be on the stairs, mademoiselle.”

“There’s a man at your front door who wasn’t there yesterday.”