Page 70 of The Scarlet Ball

That made him smile, and it was somehow only more infuriating how lovely it was, entirely for me.

“I am. Of course I am, I—”

“You are Sebastian Rowe, grandson of Admiral Charles Rowe, and son of Wentworth Rowe who served in the Civil War. Your mother was born a Payne, and her roots go all the way back to the Colony of Massachusetts Bay. You are welcome everywhere in society. Doors open before you ask, so why bother asking?”

I kept my tone as light as if we were flirting, but he looked wounded.

“Not every door. Not every house.”

“Is your preference supposed to flatter me?”

“It is only the truth,” he insisted. “There’s only one house to which I wish to gain entry. There is only one door I want opened.”

“And when asking is not enough, you’ll use force. Or laudanum. At least I might be asleep before you begin.”

“That wasn’t me.”

He was confused, which was somehow worse than hurt or indignant. I had suffered blame and accusation before; at least then I’d know what kind of man I was dealing with, but as I had to be reminded over and over again, this was never a man.

“You were going to eat me.” It came out unexpectedly disappointed. Somehow all the anger that I had been nursing for more than a week went out of it, and what was left behind was a bedrock of weariness and old fear. There wasn’t even any surprise. I was too old and clever for that.

He nodded slowly. “Of course I was. It is what I want to do most in all the world.”

“Is that all that you can think about?”

I expected another Yes, of course. Instead he paused.

“Sebastian?”

“This place.”

He cast a glance at the rest of the room. Delmonico’s, the birthplace of fine dining in the New World, as if good food ever needed to be born. Under the crystal chandeliers, the city’s finest circulated like blood in the veins of a Thoroughbred. Servants moved about with trays of drinks and small platters of sea scallops on crackers, the thick lobes of white flesh cut to resemble flowers with a dot of gemlike black roe at the center. There was no magic here except what we kept on our bodies or burned in our hearts. All of it was beautiful, all of it was expensive, all of it gone by morning for the next party or ball.

“What about this place?”

“This place will not allow you to stay as you were.”

“I can’t imagine there is any place that will,” I said, puzzled, and he smiled, a thing of shocking lonely beauty.

“Where I come from, we are what we are. Mr. Howard didn’t come into existence only when there was a city to burn. I was not born only when there were ships to wreck. We were always ourselves. You begin to see us when we break things. When we grow hungry for what you have.

“There’s just—so much. This world. It’s like. Imagine yourself drawing a spiral, and every pass goes closer to the center. It is like that, only there is no end to it, no moment where you come to the center and call it done. It only grows tighter and denser, and there is no end to it, and no bottom, it goes on forever, and even we were never made for forever. There are. There are manners and horses and food and papers and schools and taxes and hatred and justice and injustice and…”

“Stop.”

His head came up, and his eyes were that stormy Atlantic sky again. I hid a smile because he hadn’t realized how much easier it was to be a storm than a man. He gave me a reproachful look, human again.

“You’re laughing at me.”

“A little. Does it make you angry?”

“Why should I ever be angry with you?”

“I have no idea why you feel anything, let alone why it’s me you’ve chosen to feel it for.”

He looked startled, as if it should have been self-evident. “The first time I saw you.” He spoke slowly but urgently, to make sure I understood. “I had been somewhere else, and now I was here. I didn’t understand where I was or what I was seeing. It was my first time in this world, in the city, my first night, my first moment—and then there was you. You came out the door, and you looked up. You walked as if nothing in the world would ever stop you.” A laugh like a rattle of ice from the roof. “You nearly took the head off a dog on fire. It was you. From the beginning, it was always you.”

From the beginning? I remembered the rain and the wind the night I had come to the Howards’ door—that night had started more than I had ever guessed at. What would have happened if I hadn’t gone to the Howards’ house, if Ginny hadn’t run, if Mrs. Howard hadn’t decided I was a useful substitute? That was the night Sebastian’s hunt had started, but my own flight had begun an ocean away and years before. I had always been prey for monsters who looked like men.