Page 44 of The Witch They Crave

No stone. No drain in the floor. No grey light through a grate. The ceiling above me is high and pale and painted with something at the corners—vines, maybe, worn soft with age—and there's a warmth on my face that takes me a full breath to place because I haven't felt it in so long. Sun. Real sun, pouring gold through a window into my new room.

For a second I let myself lie in it. Then I remember whose sun it is, and I sit up.

The room's the same one they walked me into last night—too big, too soft, too beautiful, a wardrobe full of clothes in my size and a window that opens and a bed that swallowed me whole. In the daylight it's worse, not better. Every lovely thing in it is a reminder that it was all chosen for me, arranged for me, waiting for me, by a man who wants me to feel exactly this: warm, and clean, and kept.

Why?

I get up and poke around. There's a bathroom bigger than my old cottage, a wardrobe stocked, a window over the north lawn that opens onto a two-story drop I clock without meaning to. Escape isn’t really an option for me anyways.

And then I smell it.

It comes up through the floor, through the crack under the door, and my stomach turns over so hard it actually hurts. Food. Real food, warm food, butter and bread and something with cinnamon in it, and my body forgets every complicated feeling I have about this house and just wants. Two weeks of whatever basic slop got slid under a door. I pull the robe from the back of the door and knot it tight and I'm down the stairs before I've decided to be, following my own nose like it's got a leash on me.

Then I hit the dining room doorway and stop dead.

I have never seen so much food in one place in my life. It runs the whole length of a table built for twenty—platters of eggs and fruit and pastry, bread still steaming, silver domes, a dozen dishes I couldn't name at gunpoint—all of it laid out and gleaming under a row of tall windows, all of it, apparently, for me.

Something in my chest pulls tight and stupid at the sight of it. I grew up on trays. Portions decided by other people, slid across counters, counted out. I've spent my whole life being fed like a thing that might bite. And now here's a feast the size of a wedding, arranged just so, waiting on me to walk in.

It's the most beautiful thing anyone's ever done to control me.

Because that's what it is. I know that even as my mouth waters. This isn't kindness. It's a demonstration—look what I can give you, look how easily, look how much—and the awful part is that it lands anyway, that some starved animal part of me wants to sit down in it and weep.

Leopold's at the far end of the table. Of course he is. He could've set two places at a corner, close enough to pass the salt; instead there's an acre of white linen between us, so every word I say has to travel the whole room and he never has to raise his voice at all. Even the seating's a sentence about who's in charge.

He watches me take it all in. He's enjoying it—the way I stopped in the doorway, the way I can't quite keep it off my face.

"You're up," he says, warm, delighted, like we're old friends and this is any ordinary morning. "Come. Sit. You've been living on scraps for weeks—I won't have it said I starved you."

There's a place laid at the near end, closest to me, farthest from him. I sit down at it before I've decided to, because my stomach's making my choices now, and I hate a little that it's this easy.

And then I notice: there's nothing in front of him.

No plate. No glass. Just that cup of dark something he holds and doesn't drink. And a thought crawls up the back of my neck before I can stop it—does he even eat? Is this whole feast just staging, a thing he had built for my benefit like the sunlight and the tub? Or is the plan that halfway through my breakfast some poor human gets walked in on a silver tray and he drinks his in front of me, casual, watching my face to see if I flinch?

I decide I don't want to know badly enough to ask. Not yet. I pick up a fork instead.

"Take your time," he says, from a hundred miles away. "There's no hurry. There's never any hurry here."

He lifts his cup and drinks, and I realize a beat too late what's in it. Not coffee. Not wine. It's thicker than that, darker, and when it hits his tongue his eyes fall shut and roll back and something like bliss moves over his whole face, slow and obscene, a man sinking into a warm bath. He actually sighs. Blood. He's drinking blood in front of me at breakfast the way another man might savor the first coffee of the morning, and my stomach heaves so hard I have to put my fork down and look at the window until it settles.

When I make myself look back, he's watching me. Of course he is. And this is the part I'll never say out loud, not under torture: he's beautiful. It's not fair how beautiful he is. Long and lean, draped in the chair like he was poured into it, white hair catching the window light, the kind of face they used to carve out of marble and put in temples. Some Greek god who wandered off his pedestal and decided to ruin my life. Elegant. Expensive. Aware of every inch of it. I've met a lot of monsters like him but he doesn’t even have the decency to be hideous.

He's the prettiest, and he knows I noticed.

So I eat. Petty as it feels to give him the satisfaction, going hungry to spite him only spites me, and I'm done being the kind of hungry the facility made me. The food's good. It's obscenely good, and I hate that it's good, but I hate more that he watches me figure that out with a little private smile, like something's going exactly the way he planned it.

Fine. Let him smile. I've got a mouthful of the best breakfast of my life and a question I've been carrying around for two weeks, and I'd rather spend it than choke on it.

"Ask," he says, before I can. Reading me like a menu.

"Ask what?"

"Whatever you've been chewing on since you sat down. It's louder than the silverware." He sets the cup down. "I told you. In this house you want for nothing. That includes answers. Within reason."

So I set the fork down. I've got one question I actually want the answer to, and I've been carrying it since Odette's note, folded up small under everything else, and I'm not going to get a better chance to spend it than a morning when he's decided to be generous.

"The rune on my old door." I keep my voice flat, level. I don’t want him thinking I’m freaked out about it. "That was you."