Page 23 of Maksym

I could have avoided it. For a time. A wiser man might have fed her first, allowed Millie back in, waited until Grace had enough strength to hear one more impossible thing without it becoming another weapon. I had ruled long enough to understand timing.

But I had also ruled long enough to know when evasion became disrespect. She had been lied to enough. I held the silence for one beat. Two.

Then I said, “Because I could not bear to let you die.”

Her eyes did not leave mine. “You don’t know me.”

“No.”

“Then why?”

The bond moved beneath my ribs, vast and merciless. I saw her breath catch. She must have felt something too. I looked down at my hands for the first time since she sat.

“When I found you outside the club,” I said, “you were already fading. I could hear your heart failing. I could smell how much blood you had lost.”

Her throat moved.

“I took your hand.”

The memory returned with such clarity that for a moment the suite fell away. The sidewalk. Desert night. Her skin cold beneath mine. The broken whisper of blood slave. The bond snapping through me with the force of a star collapsing inward.

“And when I touched you, I felt something I have not felt in four hundred and thirty-five years of living.”

Grace stared.

I continued before cowardice could dress itself as restraint. “Among our kind, there is a bond. Rare. Sacred to some. Inconvenient to others. The Goddess chooses what blood and reason often would not. One soul recognizes another. Not affection. Not lust, though that may come. Recognition.”

Her face had gone very still.

“A mate bond,” I said. “You are my mate.”

Silence. Then Grace blinked once. Her mouth opened.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No.”

She pushed back from the table. The chair scraped only a little, but the sound cut through me. I forced myself not to move. She was not fleeing. Not yet. She only needed space, and space was now a gift I would have to learn to give as carefully as blood.

She looked toward the door, then back at me, then at the decanter, as if all of it might rearrange into something less deranged if she found the right angle.

“A mate,” she said.

“Yes.”

“A vampire fated mate.”

“Yes.”

Her hands lifted slightly from her lap and fell again. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I understand it sounds—”

“No, you don’t.” She laughed, and this time there was almost hysteria in it, thin and bright at the edges. “You really, really don’t.”

I remained still. She pressed her palms to her eyes for a moment, then dropped them. Her eyes were wet now, furious with it.

“I grew up in the mountains of Tennessee with nothing,” she said. “Do you understand that? Nothing. My parents died when I was five, and my grandmother raised me in a house that was one bad winter away from giving up. People heard my accent and decided I was stupid before I ever formed an idea. Hillbilly. Charity case. Quota girl. Pick your favorite.”