Page 74 of Flames and Blood

Somebody puts a chair behind me. I sit down in it without noticing that I have.

A tall, steel-haired man crosses the room and stands in front of me, arms folded. “I’m Viktor Parlance,” he tells me. “Our Collective monitors this sort of activity. Tell us what happened.”

I start with the cells, because that’s where the useful part starts.

“A doctor came to me before they moved me on. He had a case and a tape measure. He measured my arms, my hips, and the width of my pelvis. He looked at my teeth. He asked how often I came into heat.” I keep my voice steady. “He was a dragon,” I say.

Everyone goes quiet.

“You’re sure of that?” Caleb says.

“I knew what he was the second he came through the door. And he knew what I was before he opened his case. He wasn’t guessing at my bloodline. He had it written down in front of him.”

Viktor says something low to the man beside him, and that man leaves the hall fast.

“After the doctor, they moved me to a house,” I say. “Days in a truck. Mountains somewhere, that’s all I can tell you. The man who runs it calls himself Renwick. There’s a woman who runs the household, Mrs. Nell. A man on the door called Hollis. Men outside. It isn’t a prison. It’s a comfortable house with staff in it. But it was just as bad as the cells that I came from; it’s where women were taken to produce babies for dying bloodlines.”

“Renwick owns it?” Viktor asks.

“Renwick runs it. He never once spoke about himself as the one making the decisions. He spoke about clients. What the clients wanted. When the clients were expected.”

“How many women were in that house with you?”

“I never saw another one.”

“Then how do you know there have been any?”

“The closet in my room.” My hands have started to shake, so I sit on them. “There were maternity dresses in it for every stage of pregnancy. The last few were for a woman nine months gone.” I look at Viktor and nobody else. “Nobody buys a wardrobe like that for one woman one time. It’s been used before. It’ll get used again as soon as they put somebody else in that room.”

Nobody in the hall says anything at all.

Caleb’s jaw has gone tight. “And the buyer?”

“Ilmar Vex. He was the one Renwick brought in after they’d prepared me. But he didn’t last long.”

When I say Vex, the room changes.

“Ilmar Vex is dead?” Caleb says.

“I watched it happen. Crowe killed him in the room where that old pig planned to… I think you can guess what he planned to do to me.”

Every dragon in that hall turns to look at Gideon. He’s standing against the wall by the door. He doesn’t move.

“Then the Vex line has one male left,” Caleb says. “One. And he isn’t in a position to father anything.”

“Good,” says Ysabelle.

“That’s fourteen hundred years of a seat gone in one bedroom,” says somebody near the fire.

“It’s a bloodline of men who think they can buy women,” she says. “I’ll sleep soundly.”

Viktor still hasn’t sat down.

“I’m going to be straight with you about where this leaves us,” he says. “The Collective has nothing on any of this. No name, no house, no road. Until you walked in here tonight, nobody had told us that somebody is matching women to buyers with rare bloodlines and running it as a business.”

“Then open a file.”

“It’ll be open before you’ve left this hall.” He doesn’t make it sound like a favor. “What I can’t give you is speed. Everything you’ve told me tonight came from one person, and one person is where we start, not where we finish. We need the road, the house, the doctor, and somebody prepared to corroborate this.”