Page 75 of Flames and Blood

“How long?”

“It takes as long as it takes.”

“There’s a woman in that room by now.”

“Probably,” he says, and he doesn’t dress it up for me. “I’d rather tell you that than give you a date I can’t hold to.”

Nobody argues with him. Nobody offers me anything better. When I stop talking, the quiet in the hall is a different quiet than the one before.

“You should go home,” Caleb says. “Your clan needs to know you’re alive.”

I don’t want to go home.

“I…” I lick my lips. “I’m not sure that I should.”

Viktor blinks in surprise. “Why not?”

Because somebody in my clan put me in that facility. Going home means standing in a hall with all of them, being pleasant, not knowing which one it was.

How do I say that? I have no proof. After what I’ve been through, they might think I’m delusional anyway.

For one second, I think about asking if I can stay here. Then I look around the room. Dragons who aren’t my dragons. A vampire court that owes me nothing. A woman I care for who has her own mate and her own year of hell to recover from.

Every one of them would say no, kindly, and every one of them would be right. This isn’t their inheritance. It’s mine.

“All right,” I say. “I’ll go home.”

Saying I’ll go home is harder than it sounds. Nobody in the room notices. That’s fine. I didn’t say it for them.

“Crowe takes her,” Faine says.

It comes out already decided. Nobody asks him. Nobody asks me.

I look at him. He’s already looking at me. Neither of us says anything about it.

Dorian pushes back off the table he’s been leaning on and checks his watch.

“Are we close to finished? Juno is due any day now. She has run entirely out of patience with me, with this building, and with the concept of stairs. If I’m not home for dinner she’ll fly down here herself, and I believe her.”

“Go home, Dorian,” Caleb says.

“I’m going.” He stops beside my chair on his way past. “Congratulations on being alive. Genuinely. We don’t get enough good news around here.”

Then he’s gone through the door at speed. Two people laugh. Somebody starts talking again at the far end of the hall.

Serenity comes over.

“You’re quiet,” she says.

“I go home tomorrow.”

“That’s good.”

“It should be.”

She waits.

“Somebody in that clan sold me,” I say. “I still don’t know who. I’m going to walk into my mother’s hall and stand in front of every person I grew up with, and one of them sold me to blood dealers.”