The buckle came open.
He drew the strap through the loop. He eased the shoe off. He set it down beside his knee on the rug.
He held my foot.
He did not, at first, do anything with it. He held it in his gloved palm, the heel cupped, the arch lifted, the cold shamed instep bare to the warm gold air of the room, and he looked at it. He looked at the dried blood at the kneecap above. He looked at the small ladder of tights. He looked at the smear of New York on the sole, and he did not flinch from it, and he did not, the way most men I had ever sat opposite would have, performed any reaction to it. He looked at it the way he had looked at me. He looked, and the looking was the thing.
Then he raised his right hand to his mouth and took the glove off with his teeth.
I want to put this on the page slowly, because it happened slowly. He bit, very gently, at the very tip of the index finger of the glove—the soft leather between his teeth, the small private flash of his canines, the slow draw of the leather away from the hand by the tooth—and he pulled. The glove peeled back over the knuckle. The knuckle came out pale, mercury-pale, the same shimmer along the inside of the wrist that I had touched on the plain. He drew the leather the rest of the way off with a single slow contracted backward turn of his head. The glove came away in his teeth. He set it, with as much care as he had set the shoe, on the rug beside his knee.
His palm came back to my foot.
His bare palm.
The heat of it went into the sole of my foot and from the sole of my foot up the long cold wet ladder of the calf and along the backof the knee where the bead of dried blood was and into the place at the base of the spine where his other hand had been resting, and it kept going. It went up the ribs. It went into the back of my throat. It made, as it travelled, a small humming line of itself along the cold seam of sigils on the inside of my left wrist, and the sigils, finally given the temperature they had been waiting for, settled.
I made the noise again. A small involuntary release.
To my shame, my pussy throbbed.
He did not look up at me. He kept his hand where it was. His thumb moved, once, in a slow stroke along the arch of my foot, from the ball to the heel and back. My toes curled against his palm without my asking them to.
“Eat first,” he said. His voice was lower in this room. The mirror behind his desk caught the shape of it and gave it back at the very edge of hearing. “Then I will tell you all you need to know.”
The tray was on the table at my elbow.
I did not see it arrive. I did not see anyone bring it. It was, between one breath and the next, simply there: a low silver tray with a small round bowl of soup the color of old gold, a folded napkin of grey linen, a piece of dark bread on a wooden plate, a small dish of yellow butter, a wedge of soft cheese on a vine leaf, and a low tumbler of something the color of clear river water. The smell of the soup came up off the tray and went into me with the effortless authority of a thing my body had been preparing for without my knowledge.
I picked up the spoon.
I ate.
He waited until I had set the spoon back in the bowl, watched me, sitting in the the chair opposite mine.
The fire moved between us in the grate. The mirror behind his desk pearled.
“So. I apologize for the shock of this. You must be confused.”
“Understatement of the century.”
“Quite. Well. My father is dying,” he said.
He said it without theater, with the quiet of a sentence that had been, in his head, a sentence for a long time. The words went into the small warm room and the room took them.
“I’m sorry.”
He raised a pale, strong hand. “Please. There’s no need for sorrow. His death is not a mortal death. It’s difficult to explain. He will persist afterward. The way I want. The way all living creatures want.” He sighed. “His name does not signify in any tongue you speak,” he said. “He has sat for an age you cannot count on the obsidian throne at the center of this realm, hell, we call it Infernum, and he is dying on it now, slowly, and the throne does not pass by primogeniture or by combat or by the old cruelties his fathers used. It passes by a Rite. The Rite of Ascension.” He paused. He looked at the fire. “I have seven brothers. You have met no one yet who could prepare you for them. The Rite will go to the brother who can most closely do the one thing none of us has, until recently, ever been able to do.”
He looked at me then.
“Bond,” he said. “Soul to soul, with a willing human mate.”
I sat very still.
I had, at the soup, given up thinking. I had given up sorting. I had let the room sit on me in the dark gold of its own logic, and the words he was now putting into it landed not where my analytical mind had been all evening but somewhere lower, behind the small old place where I had carried the manuscript in the drawer. The bond. Soul to soul. The cold seam of sigils on the inside of my left wrist gave a single small pulse.
“Pride,” he said.
