Page 111 of Maksym

“Then I admire your civic responsibility.”

I looked at her mouth. That was a mistake.

Her lips were slightly parted, still damp from the blood wine she had sipped upstairs. I remembered the way she had licked my wrist closed after feeding. The instinctive gentleness of it. The small collapse of her body against mine after pleasure had taken her. I remembered too much, too quickly.

My jaw tightened hard enough to ache. Grace saw it.

She had been trained by courtrooms and predators both, and men who thought women failed to notice hunger were usually men who had benefited from being underestimated.

“I don’t know what I’m asking for,” she said.

That sentence did more to discipline me than any blade could have.

I turned my head slightly, enough to drag my gaze away from her mouth and place it where it belonged: on her eyes.

“Then I will not decide for you.”

Something in her expression altered. Not relief exactly. Relief would have been too clean. This was more complicated: a pressure easing and tightening at the same time.

“I didn’t think you would,” she said.

“No?”

“If I thought you would, I wouldn’t be standing here.”

The trust in that nearly unmade me.

I lowered my hand from the wall and clasped both behind my back because leaving it there had become theater, and I had no wish to perform restraint so close to her body. I wanted restraint to be real, not ornamental.

Her eyes followed the movement.

“I do want to return to the estate,” she said quietly. “I’m tired. I’m overstimulated. I have met your father, your stepmother, a hellhound, a sex club, your brother from a distance, a wolf princess waitress, and a live educational demonstration that may require a cold shower.”

“That seems a fair assessment.”

“And,” she added, voice lower, “I don’t want to continue to sit in that room with strangers and feel like my skin is on inside out.”

My hands tightened behind my back.

“There is nothing wrong with leaving.”

“I know that intellectually.”

“Grace.”

Her name stopped the flutter of her gaze.

“You asked. We leave. That is the rule.”

She held my eyes. “Even if I’m not leaving because I’m upset?”

There it was again. The door not opened, perhaps, but touched. Fingertips on the handle. A woman looking at me as if she did not fully understand the room beyond it but knew she was the one who would decide whether to enter.

“Especially then,” I said.

Her breath caught.

For one second, the hallway ceased to belong to Obsidian. There was no club below us, no politics, no Lucian Devereux moving somewhere in the world with his borrowed arrogance and stolen blood. There was only Grace against dark wood, her pulse racing, her scent turning my discipline into a blade I held against my own throat.