Page 77 of Bought for Blood

“There is.”

“He came with the note for Bastien?”

“He did.”

“Yves.” I don’t take his hand. “I spent a year somewhere nobody told me anything. I got very good at figuring things out. Something’s wrong.”

He gets to the step below mine and stops. Behind him, down in the hall, somebody slides a bolt across the front doors.

“Your door hasn’t got a lock on it,” he says. “I noticed it the day you came. I’ll have one put on this afternoon, and you’ll keep it shut tonight.”

Chapter 26

Bastien

There’s a man on my gate who I don’t know, and I’m the one who put him there.

He came the night the message did. Since then he’s stood at the top of my drive from dark until dawn. One of his people walks the south wall where it drops to four feet. My own staff have stopped asking me about it.

The message was four lines. The duty desk at the compound logged an inquiry against the Sangrey designation. Someone wanted to know which client holds it now and where the asset is being kept.

I read that at eleven at night with Serenity sitting beside me, still weak.

I went out and found Crowe. By two in the morning, there was a security team on my property.

She asked me where I was going. I told her out. I never woke her to tell her I was back.

I’ve been in the study for hours, working, and the work is the same as it’s been since I started. More detail now. More threads to follow. But not enough. Compound six answers to a duty desk. The duty desk answers to an office we haven’t been able to track down. Above that office we don’t know anything, and that’s the information Faine wants.

Yves comes in at three with the post and stands there after he’s put it down.

“She’s out on the woodland track again, my lord.”

“I know.”

“She went past the yew this time.”

“She’s allowed to.”

“Very good, my lord.” He straightens the papers I’ve already straightened. “I’d rather she was inside before the light goes.”

“So would I. Tell her that yourself. She listens to you more than she listens to me.”

He goes.

I give it a quarter of an hour. Then I get up and cross to the window.

The shutters are closed, and the sun is well above the ridge, so I stand back and put my eye to the gap where the shutters meet. The light lies across the boards a foot short of my shoes. I don’t go nearer than that.

The lawn runs down to the trees, and there’s nothing on it for a long while.

Then something comes out of the treeline.

Gray, low, moving at a good pace with its head down. It comes into the open. The sun catches the coat along the spine, and the whole animal goes half silver. It crosses the grass at an angle. Halfway across it slows, then stops.

Then the shape of it goes wrong at the shoulders. It comes up off the ground into a woman, on her feet in the grass, pushing her hair back off her face with both hands.

Then she isn’t there.