ELEVEN
An hour later Zsadist was in the cellar at the Brotherhood’s mansion, sitting in front of the old coal-burning furnace in the basement. The damn thing was a relic from the 1900s, but it worked so well there was no reason to upgrade.
Plus, it took effort to keep the coal burning, and doggen loved regular duties. The more chores, the better.
The great iron furnace’s belly had a little window in the front, one made from inch-thick tempered glass, and on the other side flames rolled, lazy and hot.
“Zsadist?”
He rubbed his face and didn’t turn around at the sound of the familiar female voice. On some level he couldn’t believe he was going to do what he was about to, and the urge to bolt was ripping him up.
He cleared his throat. “Hi.”
“Hi.” There was a pause, and then Mary said, “Is that empty chair next to you for me?”
Now he twisted around. Mary was standing at the bottom of the cellar stairs, dressed as she usually was, in khakis and a Polo sweater. On her left wrist was an enormous gold Rolex, and she had small pearls in each of her earlobes.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it is . . . thanks for coming.”
Mary walked over, her loafers making a little clipping noise on the concrete floor. When she sat down on the lawn chair, she repositioned it so it faced him and not the furnace.
He rubbed his skull trim.
As silence meandered around, a blower came on across the way . . . and upstairs someone turned on the dishwasher . . . and the phone rang in the back of the kitchen.
Eventually, because he felt like a fool for not saying anything, he held up one of his wrists. “I need to practice what I’m going to say to Nalla when she asks about these. I just . . . I need to have something ready to say to her. Something that . . . is the right thing, you know?”
Mary nodded slowly. “Yes, I do.”
He turned back to the furnace and remembered burning the Mistress’s skull in it. Abruptly he realized that was the equivalent of V’s ashing the place Bella had been hurt in, wasn’t it. You couldn’t burn a castle down . . . but there had been a kind of cleansing by fire nonetheless.
What he hadn’t done was the other half of the healing stuff.
After a while Mary said, “Zsadist?”
“Yeah?”
“What are those markings?”
His frowned and flicked his eyes over to her, thinking, as if she didn’t know? But then . . . well, she had been a human. Maybe she didn’t. “They’re slave bands. I was . . . a slave.”
“Did it hurt when they were put on you?”
“Yes.”
“Did the same person who cut your face give them to you?”
“No, my owner’s hellren did that. My owner . . . she put the bands on me. He was the one who cut my face.”
“How long were you a slave?”
“A hundred years.”
“How did you get free?”
“Phury. Phury got me out. That’s how he lost his leg.”
“Were you hurt while you were a slave?”
Z swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“Do you still think about it?”
“Yes.” He looked down at his hands, which suddenly were in pain for some reason. Oh, right. He’d made two fists and was squeezing them so tightly his fingers were about to snap off at the knuckles.
“Does slavery still happen?”
“No. Wrath outlawed it. As a mating gift to me and Bella.”
“What kind of slave were you?”
Zsadist shut his eyes. Ah, yes, the question he didn’t want to answer.
For a while it was all he could do to force himself to stay in the chair. But then, in a falsely level voice, he said, “I was a blood slave. I was used by a female for blood.”
The quiet after he spoke bore down on him, a tangible weight.
“Zsadist? Can I put my hand on your back?”
His head did something that was evidently a nod, because Mary’s gentle palm came down lightly on his shoulder blade. She moved it in a slow, easy circle.
“Those are the right answers,” she said. “All of them.”
He had to blink fast as the fire in the furnace’s window became blurry. “You think?” he said hoarsely.
“No. I know.”