Page 75 of Bought for Blood
I pull my knees up under the sheet. My throat is dry again already.
“Am I still worth what you paid?”
He doesn’t move.
“Because I’d like to know where I am,” I say. “You bought me for the blood. I’ve been here long enough to work out what a session used to cost you at that compound, and last night you took what…three of them? Four? Are you maximizing your investment, or just getting bored of the old way? I’d like to know which, so I can plan.”
His hands are on his knees. I watch them the whole time I’m talking. They don’t do anything at all.
“That’s the question you want answered?”
“It’s the practical one.”
“It isn’t the one you’re asking.”
“Answer the practical one.”
“No,” he says. He’s gone very quiet, and I can’t tell why.
“Why didn’t you close them?” I put two fingers on the punctures. “You always close them.”
“I’d have had to put my mouth on your neck.”
He says it plainly, and then he reaches over and takes my ankle through the sheet. His hand is cool. The weight of it goes through the linen into the bone, and everything in me wants to push my foot into his palm and stay there.
I move my leg away.
No. You don’t get to want that today.
His hand comes back to his knee. He doesn’t say anything about it, and that’s worse than if he’d argued.
“Bastien—”
The door opens.
Yves doesn’t knock. He has never come through a door in this house without knocking first, and now he’s standing in it with the hall light behind him and a folded paper in his hand.
“My lord.”
Bastien is across the room before I’ve registered him standing up. He takes the paper, opens it, reads.
His face changes. Not much—his chin comes up slightly, that’s all—but everything underneath goes cold and flat in a way that has never been pointed at me.
“When did this come?”
“Eleven minutes ago. He’s on the road already.”
“Who carried it?”
“The same one as before. He didn’t get out of the car.”
Then Bastien says something else to him, quick and low—not English, and not the French I’ve started picking pieces of out of this house. Something older-sounding, with harder edges.
I don’t get a word of it. Not one. Yves answers him in the same language, four or five syllables. Bastien says something back. The two of them stand at the door of the room I slept in and have an entire conversation over my head that I cannot follow.
Yves goes.
Bastien takes a jacket off the back of the chair and puts it on.
