Almost.
I grinned at that, and Louis-Cesare saw it. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
And it wasn’t. Nothing important, anyway. Or dangerous. Or death-defying or, well, anything. And that was the point.
Is this how normal people live all the time? I wondered. I didn’t know. I’d never been normal. I would never be normal. But I got to visit it once in a while, and it was…nice.
“By the way,” he told me, “my majordomo would like to know your favorite color.”
I blinked. Both because that was kind of out of the blue and because he’d somehow just stacked every damned dish off the third table onto the teetering pile.
“Why?”
“I informed him that I would like the decor to be pleasing to you.”
I just stood there, getting further behind on the trash as I attempted to process that. “Why?” I finally repeated.
“For when you visit,” he said, like of course I would. And like I would care about the decor if I did. I’d never even owned furniture, and he was worried that I wouldn’t like the color scheme?
It was bizarre.
But he was standing there, looking at me like he expected an answer. Which I didn’t have because I’d never thought about it. “I…don’t have one.”
He frowned. “But everyone has one. Mine is blue; Radu’s is yellow. Your friend Claire’s is green, judging by the amount she wears it.”
And yes, it sounded reasonable when he put it like that, but it still didn’t change the fact I didn’t know. And clothing choices weren’t likely to help me, because mine had always been more about expediency than anything else. I wasn’t worried about looking good. I was worried about what I could afford, because my lifestyle tended to be hard on clothes. I was worried about the best possible camouflage to do the job, because the harder you are to see, the harder you are to hit. Or shoot. Or stab. And that usually boiled down to dark blue, which is actually more difficult to see at night than any other color, or black, because it’s the urban uniform pretty much everywhere.
“Dory?”
“I…Black?” I guessed, because I had to say something. Or God help me, he might decide it was pink.
“Black?”
“What’s wrong with black?”
His lips twitched. “Nothing. And it should provide Georges with an…interesting challenge.”
He’d finished piling up the rest of the dishes as he spoke, into a towering, trembling mountain, like the preparation for some weird ki
nd of circus act. Somehow, they were all in there—or on there, since most weren’t actually touching anything but other dishes and air. But it wasn’t going to do us any good, since they clearly weren’t going anywhere else.
Louis-Cesare saw my expression. “You think I can’t get them safely into the house?”
“I know you can’t.” For one thing, I doubted they’d fit through the door.
The eyebrow made a reappearance. “Are you willing to bet on that?”
“Bet what?”
He gave me a slow smile, the kind that said that money wasn’t likely to be involved here.
Which was just as well, since Mircea had just fired me. But that wasn’t the point, since I could afford other things even less.
“I don’t think so,” I opened my mouth to say, only my tongue had other ideas. My tongue chirped a cheerful “okay” before I could stop it.
And Louis-Cesare didn’t give me a chance to recant. He took off for the house, weaving through the yard’s obstacles like a dancer—or what he was, an expert swordsman—with that ridiculous pile of dishes on one shoulder. And somehow he didn’t drop a single one.