Page 49

When I’m down to the green beans, I ask him about Dez.

I’ve been wanting to since the oath stone. I knew a tall, quiet man who sent cards. Lenart knew him for fifty years.

He thinks about it.

“In 1987,” he says, “a fae lord came to Desmond with an offer. There was an oath on the books between the lord and a family of water spirits. A small thing, a hundred years old, about fishing rights on the Columbia. The lord wanted it to lapse. He didn’t want it broken. He only wanted Desmond to miss the renewal date. One night. And he offered Desmond enough money to buy this building twice.”

“What did Dez say?”

“He said no. And then he renewed the oath early, the same week, so there wouldn’t be a date to miss.” Lenart’s mouth moves. “And every year after that, on the anniversary, Desmond sent the fae lord a birthday card. It wasn’t the lord’s birthday. It was the oath’s. He signed them Still paying attention. D.”

I put my fork down and laugh, and then I have to press the back of my hand to my mouth because it’s turning into crying.

A birthday card. Every single year.

“He did that to me, too,” I say. “Every year. A card and a twenty.”

“I know,” Lenart says quietly. “He kept a box of them in his desk. He’d buy the next year’s in January.”

I sit with that in silence.

The tart turns out to be chocolate and salted caramel. I eat half of it in silence.

“Okay,” I say, setting my fork down. “It’s a date.”

“I’m relieved.”

“Don’t be smug. Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask me anything.”

“You explained the bond. What it is.” I lean back in my chair. “You didn’t tell me what it felt like. When you grabbed me. What was that like, for you?”

He doesn’t answer right away. He looks at the wine glass, and then out through the gap in the curtains, where the light on the river has gone from gold to orange.

“I had a plan,” he says. “There’s always a plan. A member had broken his oath, a guest was on the floor, security was moving, and I was watching all of it the way I’ve watched a hundred bad nights. I saw you step into his way, and I thought, She’s going to get herself killed, and I took hold of your arm.” He stops. “And the plan was gone.”

“Gone how?”

“All of it. Every thought I had. For about two seconds, I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know there was a poisoned woman on the floor or a man with too many teeth running straight at you. I knew you, and nothing else.” He turns the glass. “I’ve been alive for four hundred years, Tara. I don’t lose two seconds.”

I remember his face when I twisted around to look up at him. Like I’d hit him.

“And then?”

“And then I came back, and security had him on the floor, and you were telling me to let go of you.” His mouth thins. “My first thought, once I could think, was that I wanted to take you upstairs, lock the door, and not let you out until I understood what had happened.”

“Wow.”

“Yes.”

“That’s very romantic and also a felony.”

“Yes,” he says again. “So I let go of you. And I walked you to the door, and I asked you to come back in the morning, and I let you walk away down the sidewalk. Which was, I promise you, the hardest thing I’ve done in a century.” He looks at me. “The bond tells me you’re mine. It doesn’t tell me I have the right to decide anything for you. I had to learn the difference in about four minutes.”

I think about him in Merek’s kitchen, saying A bond isn’t a contract like he was reading it off a page. I thought he was being careful.

He was being careful because otherwise he’d kidnap me.