Chapter 148 The Bath
POV: Valentina Corvino | Mordaunt's Blood Club, Soho
The invitation had arrived on Parliament letterhead, which meant it was not an invitation.
Attendance at quarterly vampire social gatherings was a requirement for all formally registered vampires, and Valentina's conversion had been registered whether she had filed paperwork for it or not. Parliament maintained its own records, and full vampires who failed to appear at social obligations without documented reason became persons of interest in ways that complicated everything else she was trying to do.
So she went.
The blood club was the same building she had been imprisoned in three months ago, which Mordaunt had either chosen deliberately or hadn't considered at all, and she genuinely could not decide which was worse. The cells were two floors below the main room. She could feel the depth of them beneath her feet, the way she could feel most things now more precisely than she used to.
That was the conversion. Everything louder, sharper, more present. Blood in the air registered as information her body interpreted before her mind caught up, catalogued by type and age and freshness in a way that still occasionally made her stop and remind herself who she was and what she was doing here.
The main room was full. Forty vampires at least, plus twice that many thralls moving through the space with trays and the specific quality of attention that people paid when their attention was not entirely their own. Crystal everywhere. Candlelight. The kind of wealth that was decorating itself, every surface demonstrating the same thing, which was that the people in this room had more than they needed and intended you to notice.
She took a glass from a passing tray and held it and did not drink from it and moved through the room the way she had learned to move in the last three months. Steadily, with purpose, meeting eyes when eyes were offered, deflecting conversations that were probing rather than social. Other vampires tested new members at these gatherings, working out where they sat in the hierarchy, what they wanted, whether they could be useful.
A vampire named Cassel found her near the east wall. He was old, not as old as Mordaunt but old enough to have the kind of confidence that came from surviving everything previous centuries had offered.
"The converted dhampir," he said, like that was her name.
"Valentina Corvino," she said.
"Still running about with the Rookeries wolves?"
"I maintain connections there," she said, which was the phrasing she had worked out, accurate without being committed.
He looked at her with the measuring quality she had learned to recognize and not react to. "You're full vampire now. Parliament registered. You have standing here that you didn't have before." He turned his glass slightly in his hand. "The question your colleagues are asking is whether you understand what that means."
"I think they're asking whether I'm loyal to Parliament or to the wolves," she said.
"That's a plain way to put it."
"It's a plain question."
He smiled, which was the smile of someone who found directness interesting rather than threatening. "And the answer?"
"I'm loyal to surviving," she said. "Which has always required keeping options open."
He accepted that with a slight nod and moved away. She stayed where she was and resumed not drinking from her glass and listening to the room.
She listened the way Callum had taught her to listen, which was not for the loudest conversations but for the ones being had quietly by people who were standing close together and not looking at each other, because those were the conversations that mattered.
She found it twenty minutes later.
Mordaunt, on the far side of the room, talking to two vampires she recognized as Parliament enforcement. The conversation was quiet enough that a human listener would have heard nothing. She was not a human listener.
The hybrid child was still in the Rookeries. Isla Reid's eastern shelter, third floor, room with the reinforced lock. Sarah had confirmed the location. The Hermetic Order wanted it for the program. Parliament would provide cover, call it a welfare check, authorized removal of a minor supernatural without appropriate guardian documentation.
Forty-eight hours. That was the timeline she caught before the conversation shifted to something else.
She set her untouched glass on the nearest surface and walked toward the exit at the pace of someone who had remembered another obligation, unhurried, purposeful, unremarkable.
The cold air outside hit her and she was already moving.