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“I know.”

“That includes you.”

“I know.” He gets up and crosses the little office. He doesn’t touch me. He stops beside the desk, close enough that I have to look up at him, and looks down at me with those gray-green eyes, perfectly composed, every hair back in place.

“You’re welcome to make me wait, Tara,” he says. “I will enjoy the anticipation immensely.”

I know what he means. I feel it low in my stomach, and lower, and I think about what a man who has had four hundred years to practice patience would do with it in a bed.

I lean back in Dez’s chair and look up at him.

He doesn’t smile. His chest goes still again, and he looks at me without breathing. The corner of his lip lifts, just enough to show me the white edge of one fang, and then it’s gone.

Neither of us says anything else for a while.

Under the desk, Billy Bob shifts, stretches, and lays his whole head and one ear across the toe of Lenart’s very expensive shoe. Lenart looks down at him. He doesn’t move his foot.

At six, he walks me back down the long room. The vacuum has stopped. The chairs are still up on the tables. At the end of the corridor, past the restrooms, the red door is shut, its red lacquer gone dark in the dim light.

I've seen people go through that door. I've seen a man come out straightening his shirt and a woman emerge with a red mark around her wrist, looking remarkably pleased with herself.

I've been curious about it since my first night here, but nobody's volunteered an explanation, and I've had about a thousand other things to worry about.

Lenart stops in front of it and rests his hand against the lacquer.

“I think,” he says, “it's time you saw the rest of your inheritance.”

Chapter seven

Tara

Lenart pushes, and the red door swings inward without a sound.

I was expecting a basement. Concrete steps, a bare bulb, maybe a mop bucket. What’s on the other side is a staircase of dark polished wood, wide enough for three people to walk down side by side, with a brass rail that’s warm under my hand and a runner of deep red carpet that swallows our footsteps. The walls are paneled in dark fabric that soaks up sound. Halfway down, I realize I can’t hear the vacuum upstairs anymore.

Then I can hear the music.

It’s the hum I felt through the floor on the Solstice. Down here it turns into music, slow and low, mostly bass, more in my ribs than in my ears. The door shuts behind us, and the air changes. It’s warmer, and it smells like leather and beeswax and something green and faintly sweet that I can’t place.

At the bottom of the stairs, there’s a reception desk. Black walnut, a single lamp, a leather-bound book open on it. Beyond it, the whole level opens up.

“Holy shit,” I say.

“You said that this afternoon.”

“It’s been a very holy-shit kind of day.”

The room is long and low-ceilinged, lit in amber and a red so deep it’s nearly brown. There are alcoves along both walls, each one with a curtain tied back. Deep chairs and couches are grouped around low tables, and a small bar at the far end gleams with glass and brass. Every surface I can see is wood or leather or velvet or stone. There’s not one piece of plastic. There’s not one thing in this room that came out of a catalog.

Upstairs, the chairs are on the tables and somebody’s mopping. Down here, it looks ready for a party that costs more per head than my car.

“For the record,” I say, “when Harold Pike said nightclub, this is not what I pictured.”

“What did you picture?”

“A disco ball. Sticky floors. Maybe a mechanical bull.”

“We had a mechanical bull,” Lenart says. “Briefly. In 1981.”