Page 53 of Kazimir

“Yes,” I said, throat tight. “And yes.” The lie-sense hummed not at all. It purred.

She winked fast and slipped back, the copper of her hair a comet tail.

Not everyone brought ease. A witch with hair like iron filings and lips whittled by disdain pronounced her pledge as if checking an item off a list, eyes never once resting on mine. It was all technically correct—service, secrecy, defense on command—but my skin went cold under my dress and stayed cold after she stepped away. I met Kazimir’s gaze. He gave me the barest nod: noted, not fatal. I learned, in that instant, that not all resentment lied. Some of it just waited to be taught.

A vampire who’d been here longer than my lost months—older suit, older habits—bowed so deeply it felt like mockery. “I pledge obedience,” he said, and stopped there. Nothing about protection. Nothing about death. The words were clean. The intent behind them clanked like old chains.

“Thank you,” I said, and he registered my voice not shaking and blinked as if someone had moved his chair an inch to the left. He would obey. Sometimes, maybe, that was enough. But I marked him by the way he walked away like he was carrying a tray he intended to set down as soon as possible.

The line shortened. The air thickened. I smelled the metallic promise of someone’s temper and—underneath the sandalwood and amber and the faint dent of sweat rising from wolves who’d stood still too long—something cloying and floral that made me think of funerals.

Portia came forward wrapped in cream silk that glowed against her brown skin. Witch, obviously; power sat on her fingers like extra rings. She had eyes like polished wood—lovely and closed. She didn’t look at me. She looked at the bowl of water, then at the knife, then at Kazimir like she was halfway through calculating a path out the front door that avoided both.

“Portia,” Kazimir said. Not a greeting. A naming.

She inclined her head a degree, as if to acknowledge her presence in her own body. “I keep the ledger of wards for the second floor. I verify donor sigils and the seals on the feeding rooms.” Her voice was clear without being warm. “I pledge to your… mate”—the word stumbled—“to execute my duties to standard and to refrain from all forms of sabotage.”

I stared. The lie-sense didn’t need to engage; the words themselves were wrong. Refrain from sabotage was not protection. It was the minimum a prison guard might offer a prisoner they disliked. My mouth tasted like burnt sugar.

“No,” I said, before I had time to run it through any of the filters I was supposed to be learning to use. “Not accepted.”

The room did a delicate version of a collective flinch. Portia’s chin turned, very slowly, until her gaze rested on me. For a second, the coldness melted, and I saw something raw and human and put upon—fear, dressed in good fabric. Then the surface smoothed again.

“I have sworn my tasks,” she said.

“You have sworn you won’t light my bed on fire,” I said, making my voice a fraction softer in spite of myself. “That’s not the same thing.”

Kazimir moved like a shadow, learning how to bare teeth. “Portia,” he said, and I felt the way the consonants cut through the air. “You are dismissed.”

She didn’t gasp. She didn’t wheedle. She pressed her lips together, looked for one white-hot second like she had something to assert about seniority or value, and then kept the smarter part of her inside her mouth. Two security men, whom I didn’t bother to name materialized at her shoulders. No touching. Just the presence of removal. She left with her spine so upright it must have hurt.

I wanted to be the kind of person who could find a softer alternative for people who were afraid of me. I wanted not to be the kind of woman who needed the softer alternative to be replaced by a locked door. Wanting counted for less than breath in this room.

The vampire after her was Artimis—tall, pale in a way that wasn’t chic so much as an absence of something essential. He had the hollow cheeks of someone who’d starved on principle, not necessity. I recognized him vaguely—floor manager for the playrooms when the highest machines downstairs were running. His gaze skated across my face and refused to land.

“Artimis,” Kazimir said.

A slight twitch of the eye. “My lord.” The honorific sounded as if it had to be scraped off the underside of his tongue.

“You may speak,” Kazimir said.

Artimis didn’t bow. He angled his head an imperceptible degree, then looked past me to the water as if an open body of anything made him itch. “I pledge,” he said, “to maintain the sanctity of Obsidian’s pleasure halls. To enforce consent. To keep our rooms clean of human filth and celestial interference.”

The lie in him blinked like a flare in low fog. It wasn’t in the words. It was in the stink riding under sanctity and consent. He intended to keep his corner pure by making it impure in exactly the ways that would get to me fastest. I didn’t need whatever gift Sariel had not managed to excise to know that. I could see it in the angle of his shoulders and the pinprick pupils and the way his scent hit the back of my sinuses like a spoiled orange.

“No,” I said, the word short and flat. I didn’t look at Kazimir. I looked at the man who’d just tried to spit in my face without wetting his lips. “You don’t mean it.”

The vampire blinked slowly, as if I’d inconvenienced him with the time it took to move his eyelids. “Meaning,” he said, “is mutable.”

“No,” I said again, heat sliding into my tone before I could rein it in. “It isn’t.”

Kazimir’s voice cut the inch of air between us. “Artimis. You are finished here.”

The room’s temperature dropped. Somewhere along the far wall—likely near the demon contingent—someone whispered, low enough to be plausible as imagination. Artimis didn’t look at Kazimir. He looked at me, and his mouth did an elegant thing with contempt.

“I have served this house longer than she has thought to be here,” he said.

“You have served my house,” Kazimir said, and I heard the flint under the velvet. “Not yours.”