Chapter 5
They had arrived nowhere.
She could hear his tone hardening — the edge of impatience coming into it.
She needed a way out of this.
She took her hands off his chest and put her palms flat against the door behind her instead, estimating where the handle would be.
Step one was getting him to back off. Step two was the door.
She breathed in. “You’d have to agree to one condition first.”
The give in her voice worked. When he answered, the impatience was gone. “Tell me.”
“Turn the lights on. Let me see you.”
He didn’t answer.
Lily’s nerve wobbled — she couldn’t read him at all, and she was suddenly certain he’d refuse. “I should at least know who’s biting me.”
“So you’re agreeing to let me.”
She had to nod. “As long as I can see who you are.”
A laugh in the dark, barely audible.
Then the arm beside her ear came away.
The antiseptic smell thinned out.
“All right. Though—”
He paused, and it was deliberate. “I hate being lied to. If you lie to me, I won’t be this patient next time.”
Is there a version of “gentleman” that opens by asking to bite you? Lily thought.
Lunatic. Psychopath.
Out loud: “I’m not lying.”
“Stand right there. Don’t move. Do you understand?”
Something in her went thin — the specific feeling of having been read — and she swallowed.
“Hm?” A single questioning syllable, because she hadn’t answered.
“I understand,” she said immediately.
He didn’t say anything else. He also didn’t move away.
She was working herself into a state when she heard him exhale — held down, like something being kept in check.
And then his voice, low and rough and shaking very slightly with what she could only identify as excitement:
“Good girl.”
Her scalp crawled. Her whole body locked. She pressed her back into the door and swore at him inside her head.
She didn’t know whether he was watching her right now. She assumed he could see in the dark. She assumed nothing she did was going unobserved.
She had one attempt. She couldn’t waste it.
Then footsteps, soft, and she started counting.
One. Two. Three.
Her hand crept sideways along the door, hunting.
Four—
The footsteps stopped. Nothing followed them.
And her hand closed on cold metal.
The handle.
Before she could do anything with the relief, the voice came out of the dark again — and it had none of that coaxing softness left in it. It was cold all the way through.
And it wasn’t hiding what it was.
“I told you I hate being lied to. So I’d advise you not to.”
Lily didn’t wait for him to finish. She got the handle, wrenched it, and the lock gave with a click.
She pulled the door open faster than she had ever done anything.
Light came through the gap and her eyes, soaked in dark, came back to life.
There was nothing in her head except out.
She hauled the door wide and went through it half on her hands.
The afternoon slammed into her face and she shut her eyes against it, and she did not slow down for a second. Squinting, she ran flat out for the courtyard gate.
She never looked back. She never checked whether anything was behind her.
The moment she was clear of the property she ran for the restaurant like there was something with teeth on her heels.
Behind her, in the house, past the open door, a tall man in a white silk robe stood in the middle of the room. The sunlight coming through the doorway stopped at his bare feet. Above that, the rest of him stayed in the dark.
The afternoon sun had heat in it. Where it landed on his skin it stung, faintly.
He looked down at his own foot — at skin so white in direct light that it barely looked opaque — and in the shadow his mouth began to curve, and kept going.
“Good.”
Lily ran the entire way back and only came back into her own body once she was through the restaurant door, at which point her legs stopped cooperating entirely and she dropped into the nearest chair.
Jenny took one look. “What happened? Is something wrong?”
Lily shook her head.
“I — I met him. The man in the house.”
She was still breathing wrong, and it came out in pieces.
Jenny came around the register fast. “Seriously? What does he look like? Is he as good as they say?”
Lily waved that away and tipped her head back to look at her, the fear still sitting on her face. “Jenny, I want to call the police. He’s a pervert.”
And then she stopped herself.
She had no status in this country. There was no one for her to call, and walking into a police station was the last thing in the world she could afford to do.
Jenny didn’t catch the way she stopped.
She took the chair across from her and lowered her voice. “What did he do to you?”
The question put Lily straight back into the dark room. The antiseptic. The voice against her ear.
May I bite you?
When she didn’t answer, Jenny leaned in. “What did he do? Do you have anything — anything at all?”
Lily surfaced and put a hand over Jenny’s. “No. He didn’t do anything to me. He just—”
She told her, roughly.
Jenny sat back, relieved.
“Okay. You’re fine. I thought it was worse.”
Then she looked at Lily and hesitated. “You’re going to have to eat this one.”
“Forget the status question for a second. Say you were a citizen. He didn’t injure you, he didn’t force you into anything, and you don’t have one piece of evidence that puts him in that room.”
“And this is America. The law bends toward money. He didn’t do anything this time — and if he had, you still wouldn’t get anywhere.”
She squeezed Lily’s shoulder. “That house is off your rotation. I’ll put somebody else on it.”
Jenny was right.
Jenny was right about all of it.
This wasn’t home. This was here, and here ran on different rules, and none of them were written with her in mind.
She could hate that as much as she liked. She still couldn’t go to the police, and she still had to swallow it.
Besides — she had something more important to be doing, and she could not afford to be pulled off it for this.
Jenny figured she was in bad shape, and offered. “Look. I’ll square it with the boss and get you the afternoon. Go home. Sleep.”
Lily looked over. “Can you? Can you cover?”
