I Sold the Cursed Duke One Hundred Nights, and He Never Counted Them novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: My Price
She walks into the Grand Duke's study uninvited, lays down the contract she wrote and names her price; he adds one clause and signs, and night one begins. At dawn her father's creditor is waiting in the courtyard.
The bailiffs took Odalys Marenne's mother's harp at nine that morning.
By dusk she was standing in the Grand Duke of Drevoss's study with a contract in her hand and a footman hanging off her elbow.
"Lady, His Grace receives no one without an appointment."
"Then he can add me to his calendar," Odalys said, and shook the footman off.
The study was warm and lit by one lamp, and it smelled of ink and smoke.
Caelan Drevoss sat behind a desk the size of a coffin, writing, and he did not look up.
She had seen him once, eighteen months ago, across the Harvest Ball.
He was bigger up close.
His black hair hung to his collar, and a pale scar cut through his left eyebrow.
His hands were scarred too, big and square, and they went on writing.
"You are not on my list," he said.
"I'm on my father's. Page forty-one of the notes Lord Halcourt holds. Two hundred thousand crowns, due at Lady Day."
"I know who holds your father's notes."
"Then you know I have four and a half months and nothing to sell." She laid the contract on his blotter, on top of his letter. "Except this."
He stopped writing.
He looked at the paper, and then, slowly, he looked at her.
It was the look from the Harvest Ball, the one that had lasted a full minute and made her forget the next step of a quadrille.
It went from her face to her throat to her hands, and it did not hurry.
"What is it?"
"My price."
"For what?"
"For you." Odalys made herself say the rest as flat as a bill of sale. "They say you burn from moonset to dawn, and that the women you pay can't put it out. I think I can. I think you'll want me enough that I can."
His mouth moved.
It wasn't a smile.
"You think I'll want you."
"You stared at me for a full minute at the Harvest Ball and you didn't blink once."
"You told me I danced like a man marching to the gallows."
"You did."
"I remember." His eyes dropped to her mouth and came back. "I remember all of it."
He picked up the contract and read.
She had written it three times over, at her mother's empty dressing table, and she knew every line.
One hundred nights, moonset to dawn, in the Grand Duke's bed.
Five thousand crowns a night, which came to five hundred thousand.
That was enough to pay her father's debt and buy her a door with a key only she would ever hold.
Any night she could refuse, and a refused night was not a night.
He turned the page, read the last line, and took up his pen.
"You want five thousand a night," he said.
"I want the first night paid before breakfast, or I walk out on the second."
"Halcourt can seize anything the Marennes earn. Your own money would be in his hands by the end of the week."
Odalys had not thought of that.
She had thought of everything else.
He wrote one clause at the bottom in a heavy hand and turned the page to face her.
The nightly money would be laid in the Drevoss vault in her name, where no moneylender's writ could reach it, and released whole on the hundredth night.
Under it he had written five more words.
The Duke keeps the tally.
"That's a leash," she said.
"It's a vault. You can count the sacks yourself on the hundredth night." He held out the pen. "If I break this contract, I owe you all five hundred thousand at once. Read that line twice."
She read it twice.
It was a good clause.
It was also a rude one, which she thought was probably the point.
Odalys signed, and so did he, and the ink of his name lay black beside hers.
"Moonset is at twenty to ten," he said. He stood, and he was tall enough that she had to tip her head. "Three rules."
"I have a list of my own."
"Mine come first. There is no light in my chamber after moonset. No candles, no lamps, no fire. The light makes it worse."
"Fine."
"I don't kiss. Not your mouth, not tonight, not ever."
"I'm not buying a kiss."
"And you don't ask me about the curse." His voice went very low. "You see what you see, you do what's needed, and you don't ask."
"What about what I want?"
He came around the desk.
He stopped close enough that she felt the heat coming off him through his coat, a dry heat.
"Tell me what you want, Lady Odalys."
"A bed, a door I can leave by, and my money."
"And?"
"And I'll tell you the rest when I know it."
His breath went out of him, quiet and a little unsteady.
He put out one hand and did not touch her with it.
"It's nine-fifteen," he said. "I can't wait the twenty-five minutes. Come upstairs."
His bedchamber was in the north wing, with a bed hung in dark blue velvet and a window full of black river.
The lamp was already out.
He had left the fire burning for tonight only, so she would see what she was buying.
It gave just enough light when he turned and opened his shirt.
Black lines ran up his chest from his ribs, thin as ink dropped in water, branching across his heart and up his collarbones.
The veins pulsed, slowly.
His skin was shining with sweat, and he held himself still with an effort she could see in his jaw.
"Now you know," he said.
"I already knew," Odalys said, and put her palm flat on his chest.
He made a sound she had never heard a man make.
The heat under her hand was like the side of a kettle.
The lines under her fingers ran away from her palm.
"That's a start," she said, with her voice not quite her own.
"Take off your dress."
"You first."
"I'm not the one who's selling."
"No," she said. "You're the one who's buying, and you'll pay for the view."
He looked at her then, and for the first time his mouth did something that was not quite a smile, and it was not kind.
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