Bond

CHAPTER 3 - BOND

LUCIAN

Evelyn was waiting at the foot of the stairs.

I don't know when Evelyn had doubled back. My father had sent her to bed, but Evelyn had never been the sort of person a command could actually reach… it just passed through her and came out the other side as a grievance. So there she stood, one hand on the banister, dress still on, the diamonds still on, and the second she saw me come out of the drawing room she stopped pretending to be calm.

"Him?" she said again, like she was still trying to find a version of the word that made sense. "Him. Of all the people in this house. Of all the people in this city."

I kept walking trying to ignore her "Don't you dare walk past me, Lucian–" she shouts the minute she saw me

So I stopped walking…that was my first mistake.

"Do you know what you've done?" she said tapping her feet on the floor in annoyance – which I'd never seen from her, because Evelyn's whole personality was built on never letting anyone see her sweat. "Do you know what tonight was ? Tonight was supposed to be my night. I dressed for it. I rehearsed for it. And he –" she flung a hand toward the front door, toward the rain, toward the man who wasn't there anymore – "he looked at me like I was furniture ."

"Welcome to my life," I said.

That single line made literal smoke come off her head.

She made a noise – a real one, something between a scream and a growl – and she reached for the side table and grabbed the first thing her hand found, which happened to be a small porcelain bird, and she threw it. Not at me, exactly. In my general direction. It missed my shoulder by a foot and shattered on the floorboards, and she didn't even look at it, because Evelyn had never once in her life stopped to watch something break.

"He chose you," she said. "The most powerful man in the city walked into this house and pointed at you and said I want him like you were the last good thing in a shop, and you just –you just stood there –"

"What was I supposed to do?"

"Something! Anything! Be worthy of it!" She down crying now, which surprised me. "You don't even want it, Lucian. That's the worst part. You've been handed the thing I've wanted my whole life and you're standing there like someone handed you a coat."

then, because there was nothing left to say and because I'd learned a long time ago that the best way to end a conversation in this house was to leave it, I turned and went up the stairs.

She shouted something after me but I didn't catch it. I just climbed, slow and steady, past the portraits of Laurents who had never been my ancestors, and when I reached my door I closed it behind me with a quiet click – I never a slammed the door, that was like a death wish in this house– I leaned against it, and let the shouting filter down to nothing.

I shut it quietly on purpose. A slammed door is an argument. A quiet door is a verdict.

---

Alone in my room, I tried to think…It was a small room. It had always been small – the nursery once, back when this house was young and nobody had thought to give the adopted boy a bigger one, and by the time anyone thought of it I'd learned to be grateful for small things and had never asked. There wasn't much in it. A bed, a desk, a window, a few books, the ones Peter had slipped me over the years, one birthday at a time, because Peter was the only person in this house who'd ever remembered I had birthdays.

And now, apparently, I was going to marry Elias Lawrence.

I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to work out how a person gets out of a thing like this…because here was the problem: once a man like that chooses something, he doesn't let go. That was the whole point of him. People in this city talked about Elias Lawrence the way they talked about weather – you didn't argue with it, you just got out of it or you got flattened by it. He'd chosen me in front of witnesses. He'd announced a wedding date. He'd told my father to have me ready by nine. Men like that didn't reverse themselves. Men like that simply didn't have the machinery for it.

So the question wasn't how do I refuse, the question was can I talk him out of it.

It was a stupid plan. I knew it was a stupid plan. But it was the only plan I had, and it was mine, and after fifteen years of having things happen to me I was almost pathetically hungry to do one thing about it. So I decided: tomorrow, I'd go to his house. I'd sit in whatever room he put me in, and I'd find out why he'd picked me, and then – calmly, reasonably, without being furniture – I'd give him the chance to un-pick me.

You can still change your mind, I'd say. There's still time. Vivienne's gone but Evelyn's right here and she wants it more than I do and she'd be better at it. Let me be the mistake you correct.

And if he didn't correct it? Then I'd see how it went.

That was the most terrifying sentence I'd ever assembled, and it was also, in its own quiet way, the first decision I'd made for myself in years.

I lay back and stared at the ceiling. Somewhere in the house, a clock counted down. And eventually, without meaning to, I fell asleep still dressed, with the lamp off and the plan sitting on my chest like a stone waiting to be dropped.

---

The next morning a knock came through the door, three, sharp and impatient knock, the way you knock when you already know you'll be answered. I woke with my heart going and my mouth dry, and for one long second I didn't know what day it was or what had happened to make my whole body feel like it was standing at the edge of something, then it all came back and I rushed over to open the door

My father stood in the corridor in his dressing gown, hair still wet from the wash, and there was something in his face I couldn't name – not warmth, never warmth, but something close to it. Purpose, maybe. The look of a man who'd slept well for the first time in weeks because his problem had solved itself.

"Good," he said, before I'd even said anything. "You're up. Early enough, I hope, to go and see the mafia king."

I blinked at him…the hall clock behind him said twenty past six, then I instinctively asked "Why are you in such a rush?"

And that – that – was apparently the wrong thing to say…a slap came fast. Not hard enough to knock me over, but hard enough that I felt it a full second after, a bright sting blooming across my cheek, and I stood there with my hand half-raised and my ear ringing while he looked at me like I'd insulted his mother.

"Rush? " He asked. "You think this is a rush? You think a man like that waits around for the Laurents to be ready? You think we have time for you to blink?" He jabbed a finger at me. "You should be grateful , Lucian. Grateful. Do you understand what's happened to you tonight – what's happened to us? A man who could have had any daughter of any family in this city looked at this house and picked you . And if he hadn't –" he paused, and I knew the pause was the worst part – "if he hadn't, I wouldn't have flinched at giving you anything. Anything at all. You'd have been married off to some merchant's daughter or son, I don't care and forgotten, and I wouldn't have lost a night's sleep over it."

I stared at him even though I'd known it, I suppose. It wasn't new. But hearing it out loud, in the corridor, at twenty past six – hearing my own father say I wouldn't have flinched at giving you anything – was a different thing from knowing it. It put a number on my worth. And the number, until yesterday, had been small.

So I bowed my head. Because that's what you do in this house when someone tells you a truth you're not allowed to argue with. You bow your head, and you file it, and you move on.

"Good," my father said, mistaking my silence for agreement, which was also a thing he always did and then he thrust a bundle of fabric at me – dark, soft, folded so neatly it looked like it had never been touched by human hands.

"Put this on," he said.

I took it immediately, It was good. Better than good. The sort of fabric you could feel the price of, then he continued "The mafia king sent it over yesterday evening," he said, already turning to go. "After he left. He was very specific about your dressing.”