Page 235 of Maksym

Something in my chest shifted. I reached for the handle and shut off the shower. The sudden silence rang.

Water streamed down my body in small, cooling trails. My hair clung heavy against my back. Steam curled between us, thinning as he moved.

Maksym crossed the bathroom with the care of a man approaching a wounded animal that had not yet decided whether it wanted to be touched. Except I was not afraid of him. That was the astonishment. My body, which had learned fear in rooms with locked doors and elegant monsters, did not recoil. The bond stirred, dark and steady beneath my ribs.

He took a towel from the warmer and opened it wide. The towel was enormous, thick, white, and warmed through. A ridiculous luxury. A small mercy. I stepped into it. Then I stepped into him.

He folded the towel around me at the same time his arms came around my body, and the second his chest met mine, something cracked open.

Not broke. Opened. My knees went weak.

For one panicked heartbeat, I tried to catch myself. Old instinct. Old pride. Then Maksym’s arms tightened, and there was no fall. No impact. No punishment for failing to hold my own weight.

I let myself go. All of me.

My full weight sank against his chest. My face pressed into the side of his neck, where his skin smelled of cedar, clean soap, and the colder, darker scent that belonged only to him. My wet hands curled at his sides, fingers gripping not fabric but bare skin, muscle, the living proof of him.

The first exhale left me ragged. The next shook. After that, I stopped counting.

Two years moved through me without permission. Not as memory in sequence. Not as scenes. I did not see Lucian’s rooms or hear his voice clearly. This was older than recollection and less civilized. My shoulders shook. My breath came in wet, uneven bursts. My fingers dug into Maksym as if some part of me still believed the floor might open and take me back if I did not hold on hard enough.

He said nothing at first. Thank God, he said nothing.

Words would have required me to answer, to reassure, to shape pain into something another person could bear hearing. Silence let me be ugly with it. Silent sobs. Shivering body. Face hidden against his neck. Water dripping from my hair onto his chest, onto the marble floor, into the towel where he held me wrapped and trembling.

His hand moved over my wet hair. Slow passes. Crown to nape. Again. Again.

The motion was so patient it became a kind of language. I am here. I am not leaving. You may break here. I will hold the pieces until you want them back.

Then the bond opened.

I had felt it before, of course. From the moment his hand touched mine outside Amethyst and the universe made a decision neither of us had been asked to approve. I had felt its pull, its heat, its terrifying certainty. I had resisted it because compulsion and captivity had ruined too many forms of inevitability for me. I had mistaken the bond for another door closing.

This was not a door. It was a current.

Maksym’s strength poured through it, but not as force. His love came first. That word should have frightened me. It did not. It moved into all the places that had gone cold and dark and airless, not demanding entry, only filling space once I stopped barring the way. There was grief in him too, and rage still banked low from everything that had happened below the estate, but beneath those things was something vast and simple and unbearably steady.

Mine, the bond said, but not as ownership. Beloved. Protected. Known.

I had not felt anything like it since I was five years old and the world still held my parents in it. Before the phone call. Before my grandmother’s kitchen became my whole kingdom. Before love became something I expected to lose and therefore learned to carry lightly, carefully, never in both hands at once.

This love did not let itself be carried lightly. It surrounded me. I made a sound into his neck that might have been a sob, might have been surrender. Maksym’s arms tightened.

“My Grace,” he murmured at last.

The words were low, deliberate, each one placed with care, as if careless speech might bruise me.

I shook my head once against him, though I did not know what I denied. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps every room where I had believed I would die unknown.

“You were magnificent,” he said.

Another wet breath broke out of me.

He did not stop stroking my hair. “In the Council chamber. In my father’s office. In the dungeon. Here. Always.”

I wanted to tell him I was not magnificent in the shower with my knees failing and my breath a mess against his throat. I wanted to argue as a matter of accuracy. My old prosecutor’s instincts could have found ten objections to his phrasing even through tears.

I had no strength to make them.