I closed the door, and I did not lean against it. Instead, I simply stood as a thousand different images from my past washed over me and tangled in the throbbing hunger of my present. Everything seemed to be coalescing around this moment, around her, this Cora Shaw, all my history arranging itself a pattern to which she seemed to be the center.
I was afraid that when it was done, it would reveal my end.
The backwash of Cora’s agitation, which I could already feel through the new, raw bond, hardly helped my mental state. But I released the doorknob with deliberation and turned to face the lady’s maid who was waiting at her post outside the door.
“I believe that your mistress wishes to be alone right now, Worth,” I said, her name coming reflexively to my lips out of old habit.
She nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“When she emerges, she will need to be shown to the breakfast room.” I marveled at how even my voice was. It sounded to my ears the way it always had, as if my whole world had not shifted in the space of a handful of days.
“Yes, sir,” she repeated.
I returned her nod—reflexively, for I was an Adelphoi, and I treated my thralls with respect—and then I turned on my heel and strode along the mezzanine and down the stairs to the breakfast room off the salon at the back of the house.
The old and the new blended in my house, softening the edges of the years. A wall of recently installed French doors in thin-mutined black steel stretched from floor to ceiling against the long back wall, swinging out onto the stone terrace beyond that led down into the formal clipped lawns and hedges of the back garden. The transverse pleated curtains were thrown open to let the light pour onto the long Hepplewhite table with its exotic veneers, which had two place settings put upon modern mats. One was for me—and the other for Cora.
The buffet, which was several hundred years older, was hidden under a snowy waterfall of linen. The breakfast that I had ordered was artfully arranged upon it, a spread the size that the chef had not laid out in years. Not before Alys had died. Bouquets of flowers, still cold from the florist’s refrigerator, completed the elegant array of silver and bone china beneath the two great chandeliers that glittered in the morning light.
The house was a palace the like of which many princes of old could never have imagined in their most feverish dreams. One that the girl upstairs was making a pretense of spurning, along with all else that I had to offer her. Along with me.
I knew why she was balking, and her hesitation was as invaluable to me, as I was now, as it was angering. I paced around the circumference of the table, allowing myself to recognize that anger for the first time. The anger was a part of the darkness, a piece of myself I did not often acknowledge in any detail, much less analyze. I was her agnate, her master. That she would even think to resist—
Meant that I was not making the most deadly mistake of my life, and possibly the last one. I was too old for the cavalier arrogance of the younger members of my race. Whatever hesitations she had were all the better for both of us, and I would do well to remember that.
Alys would never have forgotten. She had been older than I, I was convinced. Possibly older than us all, one of the mythic first generation who were the children of demons and humankind, created to enslave them….
“I hear that congratulations are in order.”
I spun around at the voice to find Clarissa standing in the doorway, having come upon me when I was so deep in thought that I had not heard her approach.
Of course it was Clarissa. Who else would have flouted all social expectations and come to visit me between my bonding and the official introduction of my cognate?
“Who told you?” I demanded. Etienne and Tiberius I trusted implicitly—and quite literally with my life. They would have let it slip to no one.
“Mmm,” Clarissa said, tossing her thick auburn hair as she sauntered over to the buffet, where she picked up lids to inspect the contents and adjusted chafing dishes over their flames. “Maybe it was a little birdie?”
I looked at her narrowly. “Were you gambling with Jean on Friday?”
She picked a luscious strawberry from the top of the fruit platter and laughed brightly before swiping it through the top of a pile of fresh whipped cream. “Good guess. I would have thought that it would take you a little longer to figure it out.”
Her blood-red fingernails matched the strawberry perfectly, gleaming as she bit the fruit from its stem. She dropped the waste carelessly into a teacup.
“The process of elimination left few viable options,” I said dryly. “Hattie would have told Jean, and Jean, unfortunately….” There was no need to finish.
Clarissa laughed. “That’s why I was sitting in your little Jean-room, availing myself of a rather excellent brandy that he had liberated from your wine cellar while winning some fifty thousand francs off him that I’m sure I’ll never see. Hattie called him while I was there, and of course he was too lazy or indifferent to take the phone elsewhere.”
I snorted. “And exactly how many times have you done that before?”
“Whenever it suits my fancy,” she said evasively. “It’s not just for you, of course. Any time that anyone uses the surgery, if I haven’t got anything better to do, I beat Jean at cards for a few hours to await the news, since I’m not considered important enough to be on the first contact list.”
“You know we need to stay as secretive as possible about any success,” I chided her.
“And yet you and Etienne were always to find out immediately, whether or not you have any direct role in what happens next,” she said. “Curious, that. But really, I came by to congratulate you. And to see how you are doing.”
There was a kind of avarice in her eyes, a greediness for the bonding process that she could not feel directly, as if she could vicariously experience some part of it through me.
Clarissa, who had never bonded. Never loved and lost, for she had never loved at all in the way that agnates are only capable of loving with a bond.
“We shall be fine,” I said, and I meant not just my future with my new cognate but all of us, Clarissa included. Especially Clarissa, who seemed always to live life on the edge of a knife.
“I hope so,” she said, and without thinking, it seemed, she plucked up a two-pronged fork meant for spearing fruit and sent it spinning at my head with a flick of her hand.
I caught it. “You’d best not do that around my new cognate,” I said mildly. “She might take it the wrong way.”
“And what?” Clarissa smiled. “Make a face at me?”
“It isn’t what she would do that concerns me but what you might do to stop her from doing it,” I said.
She sighed. “I suppose.”
In the back of my mind, Cora’s mental agitation had been a constant, mild buzz. But now, abruptly, it boiled over into pure panic, blanking out whatever it was I had planned to say to Clarissa next. I started for the door before I realized I’d made the decision to move.
“I’d better scoot along, then.”
Clarissa’s voice, high and singsong with her reaction to my movement, scarcely registered, for I was already yanking open the door and striding through the salon beyond toward the desperate, silent call of Cora’s hysteria.
Above me, the lady’s maid cried out, and I heard footsteps—Cora’s footsteps beating a frantic tattoo against the marble floor of the mezzanine as she sprinted toward the stairs. I saw her before she caught sight of me, a snatch of movement through the balustrade of the staircase.
She made the first turn by swinging around on the newel post, and as she did, she spied me, her eyes going wide.
I was still striding towards her as she flung herself around the next corner and down the final flight of stairs to the foyer. She had almost made it when her foot slipped and time seemed to freeze as I realized that she was no longer running but falling toward the tile floor below—
And then I ran, surging forward so fast that one foot pushed off the top step and hurled me downward, faster than gravity could dash her to the stone floor below. I snatched her from the air and landed lightly, her body in my arms, pressed to my chest.
Safe. Or as safe as she could be, with me.