Page 90 of Bought for Blood

“No.”

“Say it.”

“Not tonight.”

“I’m so tired of hearingnot tonight.”

“I know.” He bends and puts his mouth on my forehead. He stays there a long time. Long enough that I get both hands into the front of his shirt and hold on.

Then he’s up, and moving, and out the door before I’ve got my feet under me.

I give it four seconds. Then I go after him.Not tonightmeans he’s buying time, and I want to know what for.

I get as far as the top of the stairs.

He’s at the front doors with Yves. Both of them have their backs to me, and neither of them hears me…and he always hears me.

Then a smell reaches me up the stairwell, thin and sour, and it takes me a moment to place it, because in all my time here I have never smelled it on Yves.

Fear.

“—the same as we discussed,” Bastien is saying. “She doesn’t go past the yew after dark.”

“And the men on the wall?”

“They stay. All of them stay.” A pause. “Take care of her.”

“My lord.”

Then his voice drops, and I only get pieces.If it goes wrong, you get her out. You don’t wait for word.Yves answers with something about dawn in it. Bastien says a name I’ve never heard. Then a sentence goes past withshe isn’t to knowsitting in the middle of it, and the rest is lost.

I stand at the top of the stairs with my hand on the rail.

I could go down there. I could put myself between that man and that door and make him tell me what’s going on.

He’d tell me it was business. Yves would say nothing, because Yves always says nothing. Even when he’s talking, he says nothing.

Why? Why is he doing this?

I go back up. And I know, while I’m doing it, that this is the part I’ll regret later. I turn around, and I walk back to the study, and I let him leave.

The front doors open. Cold comes all the way up the stairs. The doors close.

Then the car on the gravel, going down the hill fast.

Marthe finds me in the study twenty minutes later with a tray she puts down on the desk without being asked.

“Sit and eat it. He said.”

“He says a lot of things.”

“He does.” She straightens a fork that doesn’t need straightening. Then she stops with her hand on the tray. “You’ll want an early night tonight, love.”

She’s never called me that.

She’s gone before I can ask what she means, and she shuts the door behind her, which she never does either.

So I sit on the floor by the fire with the cage beside me.