Page 236 of Maksym

“The Goddess chose the most perfect woman for me,” he said, his mouth brushing my wet hair. “For the Kozlovs. For our house. She gave us your mind. Your brilliance. Your compassion. Your impossible heart.”

The words entered me one by one, too intimate to defend against.

I cried harder. Not because they hurt. Because they found the places hurt had convinced me were gone.

“I am unworthy of your love,” he said.

My fingers clenched at his sides.

“No,” I tried, but the word came out broken.

“Yes.” He did not sound self-pitying. He sounded like a man giving testimony under oath. “But I will spend every day endeavoring to be the man you need. Every day. And part of that is helping you put down what you have carried alone.”

The bathroom blurred around us. Marble. Steam. Mirrors fogged into ghost-glass. Water cooling on my skin. Maksym’s arms around me, immense and careful.

Put down what you have carried alone.

No one had ever said that to me in a way that made it sound possible.

My grandmother had loved me with everything poverty had not managed to take from her, but even as a child I had learned not to add to her burdens. In law school, I had carried grief like a second book bag. In court, I carried cases, files, victims, evidence, the quiet rage of knowing the world made vulnerable people prove their own pain in triplicate. In captivity, I carried hunger, terror, calculation, and the stubborn refusal to vanish.

I had become good at carrying. Too good.

Maksym held me as if I could be more than useful under weight.

I lifted my head from his neck.

His face was close. Severe, beautiful in that blunt, road-hardened way that had nothing soft in its lines and somehow made room for every soft thing I had left.

I slid my arms around his neck.

He bent slightly, already understanding before I asked.

I wrapped my legs around his waist.

His hands caught me under the thighs and lifted me as if I weighed nothing, towel trapped between us, my wet hair falling over his arm. I rested my forehead against his temple as he carried me out of the bathroom.

The bedroom waited beyond, dark except for the fireplace.

Orange and gold light moved across the deep Carpathian stonework, catching in the carved bedposts and the heavy furniture brought from old places with older shadows.

Maksym carried me toward it without hurry.

I held him tighter. For once, I did not confuse being carried with being helpless.

Maksym did not lay me down at first.

He set me on the edge of the bed with a care that felt almost ceremonial, my feet touching the thick rug, the towel still wrapped around my body. Firelight moved over him in low gold, catching on the hard planes of his chest and the lean strength of his abdomen.

He took another towel from a chair beside the hearth and stood between my knees.

“Let me,” he said.

I nodded. He gathered my hair in his hands. He worked slowly.

First, squeezing water from the ends. Then blotting near my shoulders. Then lifting the heavy fall of it away from my neck so he could dry the roots without tugging. Section by section, he moved through the task with the grave concentration of a man disarming a bomb.

After the towel came a wide-toothed comb of dark polished wood. I had not seen him retrieve it. He began at the ends, patient with every tangle.