Page 61 of Adam, Mine

“What have you brought, fledgling?” Bradley King demanded.

Victor bowed immediately, because it somehow felt appropriate standing among all this opulence, and Bradley scoffed.

“None of that; now what have you brought?”

“I . . . Uh. I wasn’t told much about you beside your specialties, so I brought three things.”

Victor held out an orb with a cork in it and filled with plants. Bradley snatched it from his hand and held it up to the light. His eyebrows furrowed with scrutiny.

“For the alchemist of gold, lead, and lives: a world in a bottle.”

“A self-sustaining terrarium,” Bradley said, grinning. “Clever. What’s next?”

Victor held out a small glass flask. “Blood of a man with half-life, recently burned by lightning.”

Bradley took this from him gently. “I’m assuming this blood is yours?” He raised an eyebrow at whatever Victor’s face was doing. “Alain called ahead.”*

“You know him?” Victor blurted before he could stop himself.

Bradley pursed his lips. “I rather wish I didn’t, but we’re brothers of a kind. Blood and Lives. Sometimes we have to work together. Send each other little gifts and all.”

Bradley’s accent was curious for a man so wealthy. He sounded northern born.

“You said three.”

Victor handed over the cloak Willem had given him. “Protection for a man undeserving.”

Bradley took the cloak from his hands and gave it a big sniff. “UGH, Willem! You can keep this. It’s worthless. The wife won’t want it stinking up the whole place. Actually, leave it on the floor by the door, I don’t want that stench following me round the house. More rooms to have to air out. You can take it when you leave. Come on.”

Bradley put the terrarium on one of the few empty pedestals but tucked the flask of Victor’s blood in his jacket pocket. Then he whirled around and strode fast through the door Victor had entered and into the hallway. Victor raced after him.

“First thing, I can’t help you much. If you weren’t a boy and under the Archivist’s protection, I’d beat you myself—”

Victor looked at Bradley’s bulging arms and momentarily lost the ability to hear what the other man was saying.

“—can open the doors for you where I can. Brogan doesn’t take visitors unannounced; he doesn’t like kids and he doesn’t have a phone. So I’ll send a man to warn him of your coming. See someone else first.”

Bradley spoke down to him like Victor worked for him or something and it rubbed Victor to irritation.

“I’m not a boy,” Victor murmured. He was tired of people saying that.

Faster than Victor thought possible, Bradley King spun around. His hand, thick and strong, found Victor’s neck, and he slammed him against the wall, lifting him a few inches off the ground. Victor scrabbled on his toes to keep from being strangled. It was humiliating.

“You. Are a boy,” Bradley repeated, dark.

A maid passing in the hallway scurried by, ogling over her shoulder in shock.

“Just because you had your fancy learning and figured out how to do the things only a man does doesn’t mean you’re fully blooded. Or one of us,” Bradley said, looking down his nose at Victor. “Everywhere you walk is ground on which you’re outstaying your welcome.”

He let Victor slide down a bit so he could stand on his heels but did not release him. Victor cowered in Bradley’s shadow, flinching at the heat of his breath.

“Learn to be humble, and grateful,” Bradley said, shaking him at every pause. “People are opening their homes to you at a moment’s notice, risking their reputation to offer you a kindness. You are seventeen. If you had been born rough, perhaps you would know the price of work and what it means to have family, to bow before destiny in supplication. You could be a man at that age then. But you are a gentleman. And for men who do not have to grovel for bread, seventeen is a child.”

Bradley let go of him then and backed up a bit. “Don’t speak out of turn in my house again.”

He gave Victor one more long look, then started to walk. Victor peeled himself from the wall, took a deep breath to steady himself, and followed.

Bradley led him out the house and to a nearby building separated by the distance of a field. They walked in silence: Victor cowed and uncomfortable, Bradley still notably furious from the set of his shoulders.