Page 16 of Maksym

My body prepared for fear. It did not arrive fully. Millie held up the cloth between us like evidence.

“I am a vampire,” she repeated. “And I am here washing your hair because you needed someone to do it gently. Both things are true.”

Both things are true.

I stared at her until my eyes blurred again.

That was the problem with truth. It did not always line itself up neatly for conviction. I had built cases on patterns, yes, but also on exceptions. On facts that complicated the first theory. On the stubborn refusal to make evidence say less than it did.

Millie was a vampire. Millie had not hurt me. Millie’s hands were the first kind hands I had felt in two years. The water trembled around my ribs as I breathed.

“I don’t understand what’s happening to me,” I said.

“No,” she said. “You cannot be expected to. Not tonight.”

“What did he do to me?”

She looked toward the closed bathroom door, then back to me.

“He brought you across death before death could keep you.”

A chill moved through me that had nothing to do with the bath.

“I died?”

“For a moment, near enough that the distinction is mostly theological.” Her tone was gentle, but the words did not flinch. “His blood remade what yours could no longer sustain. You will heal. You will be strong. Too strong, sometimes. Hungry, certainly. Overwhelmed. Angry. There will be much to learn.”

Hungry.

At the word, something inside me stirred.

Not stomach hunger. Not the hollow ache I had lived with so long it became landscape. This was sharper and lower, tied to scent, to pulse, to the memory of Maksym’s wrist against my mouth. Shame flooded me so fast I turned my face away.

Millie saw too much, but she only rinsed the cloth again.

“That part is not wicked,” she said. “It is biology. We will teach you how to live with it without becoming what harmed you.”

I wanted to believe that. I wanted not to want anything.

She finished washing me in pieces. Shoulder, arm, hand. She cleaned between my fingers, beneath my nails, over my wrists with such care that I had to close my eyes.

“His Majesty has much to explain,” she said after a while. “When you are ready, you should eat with him.”

My eyes opened.

“No.”

The word came fast. Stronger than I expected.

Millie nodded once. “Not now, then.”

“No,” I said again, because I needed one refusal in the world to hold. “I don’t want to be alone with him.”

“He will never allow harm to come to you again.”

I searched her face for the trick. Found none.

“He bit me.”