Auctioned to my Brother's Bestfriend

The cuffs come off.

For a moment I do not move. I sit on the edge of whatever I have been sat upon.a couch, a chaise, something deep and soft and not the metal chair I rode here in.and the blindfold is still tight across the bridge of my nose, and the pulse at my wrist is so loud I can hear it in my teeth. The man behind me has just unlocked the bracelets and walked away. I can hear him cross the room. I can hear his shoes on what sounds like marble.

Then the voice comes.

"Strip."

It is a voice I do not know, and a voice I do.

It is low. It is patrician. It is the voice of a man who has not, in some long while, been kept waiting. It is American, but the sentences are clipped at the corners the way a man's sentences clip when he was raised, in an earlier life, by someone Italian. It is the voice of someone who paid fifty million dollars for me three hours ago and is no longer in the mood to negotiate.

I cannot, for a long second, move.

"I said." The voice has not raised. The voice has dropped. "Strip."

My hand comes up.

I do not, exactly, decide to do it. The hand comes up because the body, when it is twenty-six and frightened and has been on a numbered block under a cold blue light for six minutes that morning, will sometimes do small things on its own behalf in lieu of weeping. My fingers find the knot of the silk strip across my eyes. They work it. The silk falls.

The light in the room is gold.

It is the warm pooled light of standing lamps in the corners of a private parlor that has been arranged, with an obscene generosity, around a single black leather sofa twelve feet from where I am sitting.

The man on the sofa is in shirtsleeves.

The man on the sofa is Kaelen Blackwood.

"Kaelen?"

The word leaves me before I can govern it.

He does not, when I say his name, look surprised. He sits the long way across the leather, one ankle over the opposite knee, a glass of something amber held loose in the fingers of his right hand, and he watches me out of the cold flat grey of an animal that has all the time in the world.

He is bigger than I remember.

He is bigger than three years ago, when he came to our house at Thanksgiving in a borrowed jacket and let my mother fuss over him because Julian had brought him home for the holiday. He is taller. The shoulders are wider. The face has been remade, somewhere in those years, into a thing whose mouth does not, when it sets, suggest mercy.

His eyes do not move from mine.

"You have," he says, "ten seconds left, Counselor."

The room tilts.

I close my eyes.

I close them and the dark behind my lids is full of pictures I have not been able to put down in three months.Julian on the steel table at Mount Sinai, the white sheet folded under his collarbones, the bullet hole at his temple closed up neatly so that I would not have to see it; my mother on the floor of the funeral parlor in a black coat she could not, by the third day, take off; the precinct captain's hand sliding the file back across his desk. Insufficient evidence, Miss Vance. With our regrets.

I had been, then, in my third year at Vance Pell. I had been, until that week, the youngest associate they had ever made. I had walked out of the precinct house into the rain and I had stopped, on the curb, and I had decided.

I had decided that if the law would not move on Julian, I would.

I built the case in eleven weeks. I built it in the office at night with the door locked and the blinds down. I subpoenaed the books of three shipping companies under three different pretexts. I turned a Lawrence accountant. I filed, in the early hours of last Thursday, the sealed RICO motion that named, by family, every syndicate moving product through the Eastern Seaboard. The hearing had been set for nine the next morning.

I did not make it to the hearing.

I made it as far as the parking garage at midnight, and the man waiting beside the elevator had not bothered, when he stepped out from behind the concrete pillar, to ask any questions at all.

That was four nights ago.

This morning, behind a velvet rope on a pier the city does not officially admit it owns, I was numbered, and weighed, and walked. The bidding had gone a very long time. The room had gone quiet at thirty-five.

The hammer had come down at fifty.

I open my eyes.

Kaelen has not moved. There are seven seconds left of the ten he gave me, and he is already counting them in the small minute movement at the corner of his mouth.

"Kaelen." My voice is not, this time, a question. "Kaelen. It's me. It's Sera."

He drinks.

He drinks slowly. He sets the glass on the low table at his elbow with the precise care of a man who has spent years learning not to break crystal in his own hand.

"I am aware," he says, "of who you are."

The hope, when it rises, rises against my will. It rises because some small part of me.the part that watched him at fifteen pull Julian out of the pool the summer Julian could not swim; the part that fell, briefly and stupidly, in love with him at nineteen and never told anyone, including herself.that part of me will, apparently, not stop hoping.

"You came." My throat is so dry the words crack. "You.you bought me. To get me out."

He laughs.

It is not a kind laugh. It is the laugh a man uses when something he was expecting has, on schedule, arrived.

"Out, Counselor?" He tilts his head. "Out of the goodness of an old friend's heart? Don't insult either of us." The mouth shapes its small cruel curve. "I bought you because I have been told, by a man who claims to know, that you are still a virgin at twenty-six, and I am, this evening, in the mood for one. Stand up. Come here. Sit on my lap."

The room, for a half-second, goes white.

"Julian." I start.

The word is the wrong word. I see it the instant it is out of my mouth. I see it in the change at the corner of his eye.small enough that another woman would not read it.and then I do not see anything at all, because he is across the room in the time it takes me to draw the next breath, and his hand is at my throat, and the back of my head is against the wall behind the chaise, and the air is no longer mine.

His thumb is under my jaw.

His face is two inches from mine.

His eyes.that grey I had thought was cold.are, this close, the color of a banked fire that has been waiting all day to be fed.

"Do not," he says softly, "ever say that pig's name in this room again. Do you understand me, Seraphina."

The hand is too tight to nod. I move my eyes. The hand eases by a hairsbreadth.enough to be felt.and the air comes back into the top of my throat in a thin painful thread.

"He was your friend."

The hand tightens.

"He was nothing." The voice has gone level, and the level voice is worse than any voice he has used. "He was a man I once made the mistake of standing beside. He is the reason.every part of the reason.that I am the man you are now looking at. And he is, I am pleased to be the one to tell you, Counselor, dead because I killed him."

The hand at my throat does not move.

I do not move.

The world does not move.

"What."

"He died," Kaelen says, "in the basement of the Conti warehouse on West Forty-Eighth, three months ago, on the twelfth of August, at one-fourteen in the morning, by a single round to the temple from a Beretta that I myself was holding. I did not pay another man to do it. I did not pass it down the line. I drove there. I waited. I shot him. I left."

He releases my throat.

I do not, when he does, fall. The wall is holding me. He stands in front of me with both hands now lowered to his sides, and the small grey expression on his face is not the expression of a man who has just confessed; it is the expression of a man who has been carrying a thing for a long time and has finally, with relief, set it down.

He lifts a finger.

He places it under my chin.

He tips my face up to his.

"And you," Kaelen Blackwood says, "darling Seraphina.you are going to be my plaything."