Page 9 of Bought for Blood

“It isn’t.”

He turns his head to the tablet man.

“That one.”

The tablet starts tapping. The handlers are already moving toward me. Down the line, the new girl is crying again, quieter this time, her shoulders coming down.

The handlers turn me toward the door. The last thing I see down the row is the dragon, rigid, stare locked on me.

Nobody’s ever come back through this door to say what’s on the other side.

It opens.

Chapter 4

Bastien

I’m halfway down the corridor before I put a name to what I’m feeling. I stop walking when I do.

Interest.

It’s been long enough that I didn’t recognize it at first. But it arrived unexpectedly in that corridor, and hasn’t left. I tap a fingertip against my chin.

How…strange.

The escort waits three steps ahead, too well trained to hurry me. I let him wait. Behind the doors at my back, eleven women stand in silk, and ten of them I couldn’t describe an hour from now. The eleventh I could paint.

Small. Fine-boned, fair hair unbound, vivid blue eyes when she finally set them on me. Her skin was too pale, but you could see where the color used to be.

Pretty. More than pretty. But that’s not the thing. I’ve seen pretty before. Pretty doesn’t interest me.

Maybe it’s the way my mind kept skipping over her. There one minute and gone the next. As if she was blinking out of sight. Maybe the fact that I had to deliberately focus on her is the reason I committed her to memory.

Has to be that. Some sort of trick.

Clever.

The escort is waiting for me, and I look up.

“This floor,” I say. “How many buyers does Vasile see in a week?”

“That’s not mine to say, my lord.”

Trained well.

I hesitate a moment longer, pondering, then, “Lead on.”

They don’t take me back the way I came. The way I came smells of bleach over blood, and buyers aren’t meant to carry that into a conversation about money. We go up a floor, through a door with real weight to it, into a room that belongs in a different world entirely.

A wide walnut desk. Leather chairs. A rug someone probably died over. Brandy in cut crystal on the sideboard. I run two fingers along the window frame; velvet curtain, but wood behind it, no glass, no draft. False. Under the cologne, this floor smells like the one below it. Same bleach. Just stronger downstairs.

Vasile Dumitru arrives with the air of a man heading into the highlight of his month. Someone’s already told him what I’m worth.

“Seigneur Sébastien-Laurent de Val-Serein.” The full name, every syllable given its due, bowed over.

“Monsieur Dumitru.” I nod. “Thank you for accommodating me.”

He twists his hands together. “You honor this house, my lord. Sincerely. When your man made contact, we hoped, but one never presumes. Please, sit, sit.”