Page 230 of Blood Curse

I looked at our joined hands. “How does it feel?”

“Chosen.”

The single word reached deeper than a speech would have.

He lifted my hand and kissed the inside of my wrist. His mouth lingered over my pulse, warm and deliberate. The hall was empty, but desire moved through me as if we were alone.

Stellan raised his head. “When am I finally seeing the flat with the terrible lock?”

44

STELLAN

The lock was worse than Bryony described.

I turned the key once. Metal caught inside the door with a sound that suggested age, neglect and an argument with basic security.

Bryony waited at my shoulder. “It sticks when it rains.”

I looked at the wet pavement outside, then at her.

She took the key, pulled the handle towards her and turned both at once. The lock gave. “You have to know it.”

“That’s not a defence. That’s a private arrangement with a failing mechanism.”

Her smile followed me into the narrow communal hall.

We had left Harrowmere less than two hours earlier. I crossed the gate, rode all the way to Leeds and walked from the car to this building without feeling a single thread pull me back. The court had continued without my presence. Mara had the security rota. Elias had the blood store. Lenora had turned off her phone for the first evening in longer than anyone could remember.

Harrowmere knew where I was and remained a house rather than a jailer.

The drive into Leeds gave freedom a scale I never found on the country lane. Traffic lights changed without regard for a king. People crossed in front of the car carrying shopping bags and umbrellas. Restaurants, flats and late-night shops filled streets that had continued to change while I was trapped inside the same boundary.

At every junction, I could have asked the driver to turn somewhere else. I could have kept going when we reached Bryony’s street.

I came here because she sat beside me with her hand on my thigh and a key to her life in her pocket.

Bryony opened her flat and stepped aside.

Warm air carried the scent of her washing powder, old books and the plants she correctly predicted would die. Three brown stalks stood in pots on the windowsill. A pile of post waited on the mat behind the door. Shoes crowded the wall beside two coats and an umbrella that appeared to have lost a fight.

The space was smaller than one of my rooms at Harrowmere.

It held more of Bryony than the whole estate ever had.

Her work had taken over one end of the living room. A closed laptop rested among notebooks, charging cables and a folder thick with marked pages. Two mugs sat on the desk, one holding pens. A calendar on the wall carried crossed-out calls and new times written in the margins.

Harrowmere was built to make a king visible. This flat was arranged by a woman who expected to work, sleep, leave and return without anyone turning those acts into symbols.

I wanted to belong here without changing that.

“Well?” she asked.

“The outer lock needs replacing.”

“You’ve been inside for twelve seconds.”

“It needed replacing before I came inside.”