A TASTE OF HEAVEN

DINNER

The knock came again, louder this time, with the certainty of someone who had never been kept waiting.

Elaine had the dagger back against her thigh before she reached the door, the blade settling into its hidden sheath as though it had never left.

Then she put the other thing back on.

The frightened woman. The soft, uncertain eyes. The hands that never quite knew where to rest.

By the time she opened the door, she was trembling again, and the tremble was flawless.

"Dinner," the woman in gray said.

Then she turned, and Elaine followed her back down the corridor she'd already counted.

Seven women sat at a long table beneath a chandelier that was only half lit. Elaine took a seat next to the rest of the women.

The women looked like people who had given blood too many times. It was not a thing most would know how to name, but Elaine had seen it before during her research and recognized it immediately. The gray cast to their skin. The hollows beneath their eyes, bruised with exhaustion. The careful way they moved. One of them wore a scarf knotted high at her throat. None of them looked healthy.

A grim satisfaction settled over her. Yet another confirmation that the man was hurting these women. She did not let her eyes linger on the scarf knotted at the woman's throat.

The food, when it came, was flesh. Platters of it, red and glistening and barely touched by the fire, as though cooking it through would have been an apology no one at the table felt like making.

Something inside Elaine turned over, older than her stomach, older than the body she was wearing. It was not disgust, exactly. It was the way something clean recoiled from a room that had forgotten what clean was.

She mastered it before it reached her face, lifted her fork, and moved the meat from one side of her plate to the other like a woman who intended to eat.

The chair at the head of the table sat empty. Elaine could guess who it belonged to, but everything she'd learned said vampires didn't eat. They drank until their prey could no longer survive the loss.

"He could at least come down," one of the women muttered as she pushed her plate away. "Seats us at his table like we're his property and won't even show his face."

"Enough." The woman in gray did not raise her voice. She did not need to. The woman fell silent and drew her plate back toward herself.

Elaine watched the exchange and couldn't decide if what she saw was fear or something worse than fear, something closer to love.

The woman to her left had been at the wine longer than the meal. She leaned toward Elaine, her breath both sweet and sour. She studied Elaine with the bright, unsteady focus of a drunk.

"You're new," she said with a smile. "Has he done it to you yet?"

Elaine let her eyes go wide. "Done what?"

The woman laughed with delight, as if Elaine had said something charming.

"Oh, you sweet thing. The deed."

She tapped two fingers against the side of her throat, over the vein, and let them linger there.

"When it happens, you'll know. Everyone knows after."

"After what?" Elaine kept her voice small and curious and harmless. Under the table, her hands were perfectly still.

"After he drinks." She said it the way another woman might say after he kisses you. Low. Wanting.

Her gaze drifted somewhere soft and far away.

"You'll beg him for it. They all swear they won't. They all do."

I don't beg, Elaine thought.

She said nothing. Instead, she pressed where it was useful.

"But he hasn't chosen anyone in a while, has he?"

Something crossed the drunk woman's face. Jealousy or grief; it was hard to tell them apart on her.

"No," she said. "Not for a long time."

Then her eyes sharpened, and she looked at Elaine as though seeing her properly for the first time.

"But he took you upstairs tonight. To the study."

She said study as though it were a word with weight.

Down the table, another woman went still.

"First night. He took you to the study your first night."

Elaine opened her mouth to ask what that meant and found the woman in gray already standing over them.

"That's enough wine."

She lifted the glass from the drunk woman's hand. When her eyes passed over Elaine, they gave nothing back.

"You'll all sleep now."

But the thing had been said, and it settled in Elaine's chest in the same place the cold blade rode, a small, hard weight she had not planned to carry.

She had engineered every part of tonight. Being seen. Being chosen. Being brought upstairs.

She had not engineered being the first in a long time.

And she did not yet know what it meant.