Chapter 5

After leaving Blackthorn, I followed Blackwater's old canal to Raven Street and knocked on the door of my father's blood-seal restoration shop.

He came downstairs carrying a covered lamp. His gaze went first to my belly, then to the tool case in my hand.

He didn't ask where Lucien was.

That nearly undid me.

Gideon Vale was human, like me, but he knew vampire contracts and blood seals as well as any elder. He followed blood accounts for a living, uncovering forged donor signatures and contracts the nobility thought they had buried. He had warned me that the Ashbournes would eventually treat a human lover as family property.

For Lucien's sake, I hadn't entered this shop in three years.

There was more white in my father's hair, but his engraving knives still lined the window exactly as I remembered them.

I placed my child's amber shard in his hand.

He stared at it, then closed his other hand around mine. A long time passed before he brought me a chair.

"Do you want me to call him every name I know," he asked, "or help you dissolve the bond?"

I bowed my head and finally cried.

My father closed the last gap in the curtains and stayed beside me until the sun was fully up.

The next night, he placed a work agreement in front of me.

"Six shipments of relief blood have disappeared at the Ravenwood supply depot. The Night Court approached three auditing firms. None wanted to touch it." He studied my face. "You can start with the ledgers. Junior auditor's rate. If you feel ill, you stop."

"You think I can still do it?"

"Your ability to read accounts has nothing to do with your taste in men."

I laughed despite myself.

We cleared the old workbench together. My father set a thermos of hot broth beside my tools.

"The cost comes out of your first wages."

"I wasn't expecting it for free."

"Good."

The broth tasted no better than what I'd received at Blackthorn. I simply hadn't needed to explain why I was hungry before being allowed to eat.

Over the next few nights, I reviewed accounts in the old chapel beside the Ravenwood supply depot, now used as a night freight office. Pine-scented mist drifted through broken stained glass, and blood crates stood stacked near the altar.

I picked up my engraving knife again.

Scraping back doubled seals on the shipping documents, I traced refrigerated transport numbers to three donation stations that did not exist.

Lucien had once praised my work. But when I questioned discrepancies in the Ashbourne accounts, Celeste called them too politically sensitive for me. After that, the ledgers disappeared from his desk whenever I entered the room.

Now Maeve, who tested blood for our team, pushed a lamp closer.

"Can you keep following this one?"

"Yes."

She slid the next ledger toward me.

When my first wages came through, I paid for the thermos and the empty room above the shop. My father handed me its old key, threaded onto a red cord.

He turned away before I could thank him, but I had already seen the red around his eyes.

On the fifth night, we recovered the first shipment of stolen blood.

Maeve poured the workers warm blood in small pottery cups and set a mug of broth in front of me. Beyond the broken windows, a supply truck rumbled past while the team argued about where the next delivery might surface.

Someone made a joke. I laughed with the others.

Only then did I realize I hadn't thought about Lucien all evening.

"Miss Vale."

Celeste's voice came from the doorway.