Page 133 of Maksym

Taras inclined his head. A small acknowledgment. One professional mind recognizing another across the battlefield.

Indignation moved across Grace’s face then, and the sight of it struck me with unexpected force. The flush at her throat deepened. Her mouth went calm. Her eyes went colder. There was no hysteria in her, no panic. Only a clean, precise anger that had once surely made criminals regret underestimating a woman from Appalachia with a Vanderbilt law degree and a memory for patterns.

“Well,” she said, calm and flat, “fuck ‘em. We’ll be ready.”

The silence that followed was not shock. The room rearranged itself around her.

Not as my mate. Not as a rescued victim. Not as a new vampire, still learning what hunger meant. But as counsel. As a weapon. As a woman who had looked at four days where another might have seen impossibility and found only insult.

My chest tightened. The sensation had nothing to do with hunger.

Nikolay turned toward her fully. He had been still before, but now he became something quieter and more open. My brother, who could negotiate peace between creatures who had inherited hatred before language, did not soften his gaze to flatter her. He simply met her eyes and placed faith there without decoration.

“I believe you,” he said.

The weight of it entered me.

Grace’s face changed by the smallest degree. Not surprise. Not quite. More as if belief offered plainly was a thing she knew how to receive in theory, but not yet in reflex.

Maddie looked between them, her expression suddenly stripped of teasing. She watched Grace with open curiosity, yes, but also something like hope. The wild Texas brightness remained, only gentled. For the first time since I had seen Maddie laugh beneath Obsidian’s purple light, she looked young in the way pain makes even bold women seem briefly unguarded.

Then she said, softly, “You hear that, Nikki? We got us a shark.”

Nikolay’s mouth moved. “A what?”

“A lawyer shark. A sleek one. Mean in court. Pretty smile. Bites clean through bone.”

Grace looked at her. “I have never been described more accurately.”

Bohdan placed a hand over his heart. “I am beginning to feel underrepresented in this room. No one has compared me to marine life.”

“You are an eel,” Lucia said.

“That was immediate and hurtful.”

“Accurate,” Taras said.

Devon nodded solemnly. “Elegant eel.”

Grace’s laugh came again, quieter this time. It faded quickly, though not painfully. She stood.

The movement pulled me to attention before she spoke.

“I think I’d like to head up now,” she said, “if that is agreeable.”

Several heads turned. Not toward her. Toward one another.

I rose with as much dignity as a man could manage while every relative he possessed pretended not to understand exactly what they understood.

“Of course,” I said.

Grace stood beside me. She did not take my hand this time. Not immediately. Her fingers brushed the side of her dress, and I saw nerves return—not fear of me, I thought, but awareness of leaving the brightness of the room for the quiet beyond it.

I gave the room one brief nod.

“Everyone.”

It was not farewell. It was warning. Gratitude. A request for restraint issued as a royal command because my family was composed of lethal creatures who became twelve years old whenever romance offered them an audience.