Page 10 of Maksym

Then it was gone. I made a sound I did not recognize. Small. Raw. Animal.

My eyes snapped open. Everything was too bright.

Not bright like sunlight. Bright like edges. Every object in the room had become itself with cruel intensity. The carved headboard behind me, split down one section where wood fibers showed pale and fresh. The heavy drapes. The shine on the floor. The faint variations in the sheets beneath me where blood had soaked and dried and smeared. A lamp burning low across the room might as well have been a blade held to my eye.

And smells. God. The room struck me all at once.

My blood, old fear, sickness sweated through linen. Expensive cologne, spare and dark, clinging to the man above me. The faint copper of my own wounds. The clean winter scent of the wrist I had just drunk from. Dust inside carved wood. Metal from fixtures somewhere beyond an open door. Stone cooled by air-conditioning. Another person near the entrance, carrying a scent like ink, steel, and restrained violence.

I heard breathing. Mine, ragged and useless.

I heard cloth shift. I heard a heartbeat.

That made no sense, because vampires did not have hearts. Except they did, perhaps. Or one of them did. Or my ears were lying. The sound came slow, controlled, too powerful to be human. Another rhythm behind it, faint, almost hidden.

The man over me stood utterly still.

Tall. Dark-haired. Amber-eyed. Beautiful in a way that made my skin crawl because beauty had never saved anyone. Blood marked his mouth. My blood. His blood. Both. His sleeves were pushed up, one wrist newly sealed, the skin unmarred as if I had imagined drinking from him. His face held no expression I knew how to read. Not lust. Not cruelty. Not amusement.

That frightened me too.

The cruel ones were easiest when they showed their teeth.

Near the door stood another figure. Leaner. Silver-haired. Sharp enough to cut shadow. He had taken one step into the room, or had been about to. His eyes moved over me and then away, too quickly for me to decide what I had seen there. Anger, maybe. Fear, maybe. Not fear of me. Something directed at the man by the bed. The air between them felt charged, like the seconds before a storm broke over the hills.

I did not wait to understand it.

I scrambled backward. Or tried.

My body had more strength than before and less coordination than a newborn animal. My elbows slipped on the sheets. My heel dragged through a damp place I did not want to identify. Pain detonated across my ribs as old bruises met motion. My back hit the cracked headboard hard enough to send white sparks across my vision.

I folded in on myself.

Knees up. Arms in. Wrists hidden, though they were not hidden at all. They were right there in the searing light, ruined bands of old bites and fresh smears, the history of what had been done to me written in punctures, scars, yellowed bruises, purple blooms, torn skin.

I was filthy.

The knowledge landed with strange clarity. Not afraid, not starving, not dying—filthy. My hair hung in tangles around my face. My dress, if it could still be called that, clung to me in stiff patches of sweat and blood. My collarbones jutted. My knees were knobs. My body had been pared down to accusation and bone. I remembered having hips. Breasts. Softness, my grandmother used to say came from women in our family being built to survive winter and childbirth and men who thought too much of themselves.

Lucian had starved the softness off me.

The dark-haired vampire lifted his hands slightly, palms open.

“I will not touch you,” he said.

His voice was low, controlled, accented faintly around the edges in a way I could not place. I felt it in my new hearing like fingers over velvet. I hated that too. Monsters should have ugly voices. They should sound like what they were.

My gaze snagged on his mouth. Fangs.

I pressed harder against the headboard. The split wood bit into my spine. I did not care. There was nowhere else to go. No door within reach. No sharpened slat. No tile to grind it on. No latch under my bloody fingers. Only two vampires and a room too fine to be anything but another cage.

The silver-haired one moved. Barely.

A half-step, maybe less, but my body understood movement toward me as a threat before my mind could name it. A thin sound slipped from my throat. My hands flew up, useless shields. The room tilted. Suddenly, I smelled the guard again. Sour smoke. Old blood. I felt his teeth in my wrist, the wet tear when he jerked away from the slat. I saw the door latch refusing to open. Open, open, open.

The dark-haired vampire made a sound. Not a word. A growl.

It rolled through the room so low the marrow in my bones seemed to hear it first. Shadows thickened at the edges of my sight. The lamp dimmed, or my terror made it seem so. The silver-haired man stopped at once.