Chapter 6 "Secrets, Alive,”

࿐ྂ༻꒦꒷𓇊꒷꒦༺࿐ྂ

“Chapter 5: Secrets, Alive,”

────── ꕥ ⋅ IVORY ⋅ ꕥ ──────

The car that picked me up the next morning was black, expensive, and had tinted windows dark enough that I couldn't see out of them properly.

Which felt about right.

I sat in the back with my two duffel bags, everything I owned that wasn't a canvas, and watched the city blur past the glass and tried to have a normal internal experience about the fact that I had signed a contract last night to give a stranger my blood three times a week.

Normal internal experience was not forthcoming.

The driver didn't speak. Didn't offer his name. Didn't turn on the radio. Just drove with the practiced silence of someone paid specifically to pretend the person in the backseat wasn't there.

I looked at my phone.

Rage Lenoir. I'd searched him at two in the morning when I couldn't sleep. Which was most of the night.

The results were, sparse. Deliberately sparse, I was starting to think. A few mentions in financial press, always on the edges of things, never the subject. Lenoir Holdings came up a lot, real estate, private equity, a collection of companies that all seemed to make enormous amounts of money without anyone being entirely sure what they did. A photo here and there, always slightly distant, always slightly blurred, like cameras were uncertain how to handle him.

No social media. No interviews. No personal details.

Eight hundred years of practice at not being found, I would later learn.

I didn't know that yet.

I just knew that the man who had bought my blood for five million dollars was almost entirely invisible on the internet, which was either very suspicious or very wealthy or, apparently, both.

The car turned through a gate.

Then a driveway.

Then another driveway.

I pressed my face to the tinted window like a child.

Oh. I thought. Oh, he is serious.

The estate sat back from the road behind iron gates and old trees, and it was the kind of house that didn't show off because it didn't need to. Stone walls the color of storm clouds. Tall dark windows. Ivy growing up the eastern side like it had been there for centuries, which - I would also later learn - it had.

It looked like somewhere a vampire lived.

I mean that as a completely neutral observation.

A woman met me at the front door.

Tall, neat, somewhere between forty and ageless, with sharp eyes and the energy of someone who had seen everything and been impressed by very little of it.

"Ms. Marwood." She didn't offer a hand. "I manage the household. I'll show you to the guest house."

"The guest house," I repeated.

"Your residence, for the duration of the arrangement." She was already moving. "Mr. Lenoir's house is the main building. Yours is separate. You'll have your own entrance, your own key, your own space entirely."

I followed her across a stone path that wound around the side of the main house, through a garden that was - even in the grey morning light - honestly beautiful. Dark roses climbing a stone wall. Old trees. The particular quiet of somewhere that had been tended for a very long time.

The guest house was at the end of the path.

Not small. I want to be clear about that. When someone says guest house you might picture something modest and practical. This was neither. High ceilings, tall windows, a bedroom that was bigger than my entire previous apartment, and a studio space off the back with north-facing skylights and bare walls and the specific quality of light that painters would actually cry about.

I stood in the middle of it and didn't say anything for a moment.

"The studio was prepared to your specifications," She said from the doorway.

"My specifications," I said. "I didn't give any specifications."

"Mr. Lenoir made assumptions based on your work." She paused. "He was correct."

I looked around at the skylights. The walls. The empty easel standing in the corner like it had been waiting.

"Of course he was," I said quietly.

The old woman left me with a key, a number to call if I needed anything, and a single piece of information delivered in the tone of someone reading from a manual.

"Mr. Lenoir keeps different hours than you may be used to. He is available in the evenings. He asks that you not enter the main house without prior arrangement. Meals will be delivered to you. The grounds are yours to use freely."

"Different hours," I said. "You mean he sleeps during the day."

The woman looked at me with those sharp eyes. "I mean he keeps different hours."

"Right." I nodded. "Got it. Different hours."

She left.

I stood in my new living room - which had actual art on the walls, real art, pieces I recognized from auction records that cost more than my previous entire building - and had a brief, private moment of complete unreality.

This was my life now.

This enormous, beautiful, slightly eerie estate. This guest house with its perfect studio. This arrangement with a man I didn't know who had bought me at an auction and had eyes that changed color and a contract with a clause in it that said all forms and refused to explain what that meant.

"Okay, Ivory," I said to my new living room. "You are absolutely fine."

My new living room did not confirm this.

I unpacked. It didn't take long - two duffel bags, a box of art supplies I'd grabbed on the way out, and the contract tucked into the front pocket where I could get to it easily.

I made tea in the small kitchen that had been stocked, I noticed, with actual food. Real food - not the sad, survival-level contents of my old fridge. Someone had gone shopping. Someone had gone shopping specifically, because there was the brand of tea I always bought and the exact type of bread and the obscure hot sauce I'd been buying for four years from a single grocery store on the east side of the city.

I stood in front of the open fridge for a long moment.

He did his research. I thought.

I didn't know whether to be comforted or unsettled by that.

I chose tea, because the other options were too complicated.

He came at seven.

Not to the guest house - he knocked at the studio door, which connected to a small side path, and waited. Which I appreciated more than I expected to. The knocking. The waiting.

I opened the door.

He looked exactly the same as he had last night. Dark clothes, that face, those eyes - blue tonight, just blue, no amber flicker, though I found myself checking for it immediately and hating that I was checking for it.

"Ms. Marwood."

"You can call me Ivory," I said. "We did sign a blood contract together. I think first names are appropriate."

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. "Ivory."

My name in that voice did something I was choosing not to examine.

"Come in," I said. "I made tea. I don't know if you-" I stopped. Reconsidered. "Do you drink tea?"

"No."

"Right." I stepped back. "Obviously. Sorry."

He stepped inside and looked at the studio the way I imagine people look at things they built - checking it, assessing, making sure it was right. His eyes moved over the skylights, the walls, the easel in the corner.

"Is it suitable?" he asked.

"It's the most beautiful studio I've ever been in," I said honestly. "Which I'm aware makes this whole situation more complicated."

He looked at me.

"Why?" he asked.

"Because it's harder to be appropriately terrified of someone when they stock your fridge correctly and give you perfect north light." I wrapped both hands around my mug. "It's manipulative, is what it is."

"Or practical," he said. "You work better with the right tools. I need you in good condition."

"For the blood."

"Yes."

"Right." I nodded. "The blood. Which we should probably-" I gestured vaguely. "Talk about. The how and when and - logistics."

He sat down in the chair across from mine. Unhurried. Like there was no version of this conversation that made him uncomfortable.

I envied that enormously.

"Three sessions per week," he said. "I'll tell you when. It will always be evenings. It won't hurt - not beyond the initial moment. You won't be weakened enough to affect your daily life."

"Have you done this before?" I asked. "An arrangement like this."

A pause. Short, but real.

"Not like this," he said.

I wanted to ask what that meant. I looked at his face and decided to save it.

"The rules," I said instead. "You said last night everything would be explained."

"Some things tonight. Others - when you're ready for them."

"I'm ready for them now."

"You aren't," he said. Not unkindly. Just - certain. "But you will be."

I looked at him across the small studio space, this strange and impossible man with his careful answers and his all forms clause and his fridge full of exactly the right things.

"You're keeping secrets," I said.

"Yes," he said simply.

At least he wasn't pretending otherwise.

"Fine." I pulled my knees up onto the chair. "Then tell me what you can tell me. Start there."

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he said: "What do you want to know?"

And I thought about the amber eyes and the air pressure in the auction room and Clause 7 on page three and the way the forest-scent on the invitation had been gone before I could catch it.

I thought about all forms.

"What are you?" I asked. "And I want the real answer this time."

The studio went quiet.

Outside, the wind moved through the old trees.

Rage Lenoir looked at me across the room with those ocean-blue eyes and said nothing for just long enough that the silence became its own kind of answer.

"Something old," he said finally. "Something that has been more than one thing for a very long time."

I stared at him.

"That is the least helpful answer I have ever received."

"It's the most honest one I can give you tonight."

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

"Tomorrow," he said, standing. "We'll talk more tomorrow."

"You keep saying that."

"And tomorrow will keep coming." He moved to the door. Paused with his hand on the frame. "Get some sleep, Ivory."

"I want to revisit subsection C," I called after him.

But he was already gone.

Quiet footsteps on the stone path, and then - nothing. Just the dark and the wind in the trees and the feeling of something large and old and not entirely nameable moving through the night just beyond the edge of where I could see.

I sat in my perfect studio with my tea going cold and thought:

What have I gotten myself into.

Then I looked at the skylights. At the bare, waiting walls.

Picked up a brush.

And started to find out.

────── ꕥ ⋅ ꕥ ──────