Page 211 of Maksym

The prosecution’s counsel lowered his head in a formal bow.

“For the sanctity of pack sovereignty and for the preservation of Council law, you must find him guilty.”

He returned to his table. The chamber did not move.

The old stone seemed to hold all of us in the same breath: Maddie with her chin lifted though her face had gone pale, Nikolay with one hand around hers and the other flat to the table, Maksym above me on the dais where I could feel his stillness like winter at my back, Lucian in the gallery silent enough to be mistaken for harmless by someone newly born.

I knew better.

The Magistrate rose.

The sound of robes shifting across the dais was almost nothing. The sound of his staff lifting from the floor was less.

Then he struck the stone.

The crack split the chamber cleanly enough that I felt it in my teeth.

“All testimony and argument having been heard,” the Magistrate said, his voice carrying into every carved shadow, “it is time for this Council to render judgment.”

Chapter 24

Maksym

The Magistrate did not give the chamber time to recover from closing arguments. He rose above us with his iron staff upright in one hand, the old stone still holding the echo of his last words, and called for Nikolay’s fate as if mercy and murder were items on an agenda already overdue.

“No further argument will be entertained,” he said.

His voice cut cleanly through the chamber.

“The Council will vote.”

A silence entered the room that was not the absence of sound, but the presence of consequence.

I sat upon my throne with my hands resting on the arms, still enough that my shadows had nowhere to go but inward. Vampires, wolves, witches, demon, angel—each species certain its way of surviving the world had been the most costly and therefore deserved the greatest deference.

Below us, Nikolay stood at the defendant’s position.

My brother’s face betrayed nothing to those who had not watched him laugh in candlelit rooms two centuries ago, or lower his voice to comfort servants who had lost children to plague. To most of the chamber he looked composed, almost remote. A Kozlov prince, bred and trained and ancient enough to endure a verdict without visible distress.

I saw the tight line around his mouth.

I saw Maddie seated behind him with both hands locked together in her lap, her chin lifted, her body held in the brave posture of someone who had already been handled too much by other people’s choices. I saw Grace at the defense table, legal pad closed now, pen resting beside it with almost unbearable precision.

I knew.

I felt it through the bond: not fear. Not even fatigue, exactly. Focus sharpened past comfort.

The Magistrate turned first toward the Demon King.

“Adramal.”

He had watched the proceeding with the blunt severity of a ruler still learning how many old sins clung to the throne he had taken. He stood on no one’s side but his own.

His voice came rough as stone dragged across iron.

“Guilty.”

The word landed without ornament.