Page 26 of Maksym

“I will not.”

Her gaze dropped to the plate. The steak remained untouched, cut into neat pieces that had begun to cool at the edges. The decanter stood between us, red catching the lamplight, patient as temptation and necessity.

I wanted to tell her to eat. I wanted to order it, which was precisely why I did not.

Grace sat across from me with one hand still held close to her chest, the other resting near the fork but not yet eating. She picked up the glass and slowly took her first drink, and I sighed, inwardly satisfied that she at least trusted enough to do that.

Chapter 5

Grace

The blood wine touched my tongue, and the room forgot how to move. Or maybe I did.

For one suspended second, nothing existed except that dark red warmth sliding over my tongue, down my throat, into my wrecked body. It was not wine the way I understood wine. It had the body of it, yes—the rounded richness, the faint burn, the old oak sweetness that made me think of polished wood and expensive rooms I had never belonged in—but beneath that was something sharper. Truer. A taste that did not belong to grapes or barrels or any civilized lie people told themselves about appetite.

Blood. Diluted, Millie had said. Mild. There was nothing mild about the way my body recognized it.

Heat spread through my chest so quickly I almost dropped the glass. Not fever. Not the dirty warmth of panic. This was cleaner, more terrible. It moved through me like a hand turning on a lamp in rooms I had not known were inside my skin. My gums ached. My fingers tightened around the crystal stem. The raw places in my throat, the ones that should have been torn and swollen from screaming and hunger and Lucian’s mouth, seemed to close a little more.

I hated that it helped. That was the first thought I trusted.

I hated that my body took comfort from it. I hated that some newly made thing in me had lifted its head and paid attention. I hated the small, involuntary sound that almost escaped before I trapped it behind my teeth.

Across the table, Maksym watched me.

He did not lean forward. He did not smile with ownership. He did not lick his lips or look pleased with himself because my body had betrayed me into need. His hands stayed flat on the table, large and still on either side of his untouched plate, as if he had put them there deliberately and ordered them not to move.

His eyes were amber. Lucian’s eyes had been pale and cold and amused when I ate what food they gave me because he wanted me to understand the humiliation of needing. He had watched hunger like a financier watched a market turn in his favor. With calculation. With pleasure. With that cruel little smile.

Maksym was not watching me that way.

Distinctions mattered in court. They mattered when parsing intent, when separating negligence from malice, coercion from consent, conspiracy from coincidence. Distinctions kept innocent people from being swallowed by lazy narratives. I knew all of that. I had built a career on it.

But sitting there in a robe too large for my body, with blood wine warming the hollow places Lucian had left in me, I did not want distinctions.

I wanted simplicity. All vampires were monsters. That was easier. That let me keep the world organized. Maksym’s quiet ruined the shape of that argument.

I lowered the glass carefully. The crystal touched the table with a small click. The sound rang.

Not loudly. It should not have been loud. It was one small contact between glass and table. But I heard the note of it travel outward, clean and bright, heard it skim the rim of the plate, tremble along the silverware, then vanish into the enormous hush of the suite.

Then I heard something else. A faint swish. Fabric, fine fabric, shifting beyond the closed door. Taras, maybe. Or Millie. Someone moving in the corridor, though the door was thick, and the walls were stone.

Another sound ticked faintly from somewhere farther away. A clock. I went still. Not the clock on the mantel. There was no clock on the mantel. My eyes moved around the room, searching automatically, cataloging surfaces. No clock on the walls. No bedside clock visible from the table. No small brass carriage clock tucked onto a shelf. Tick. Tick. Tick. Down the corridor. Around a corner, perhaps. Behind another door.

That was impossible. The word had lost some value tonight, but it was still all I had. I looked down at my hands.

My hands were cleaner than they had been in two years. The split skin across my knuckles had sealed. Not scarred. Sealed. Only faint pink lines remained, and even those were fading while I watched.

My vision sharpened around them. Then smell arrived. Not that it had been absent before. I had smelled the steak, the blood wine, the lavender still clinging to my skin from the bath. But now the room opened in layers. Millie’s lavender faint at the edge of the door where she had passed through. Taras, if that was him outside, carried a scent like cold metal and smoke.

And Maksym. It reached me across the table with awful certainty. Clean cold. Snow over dark earth. Pine snapped under frost. Mountains at night, high and merciless, where sound did not travel unless it deserved to. Beneath that, blood—his blood—rich and old and threaded with something my body remembered from his wrist.

My stomach clenched. No. Not stomach. Something lower and more dangerous.

“What,” I said, and my voice came out flatter than I felt, “is happening to me?”

Maksym did not answer quickly. I noticed that, too. He gave silence a moment to exist before he occupied it. Maybe he meant to avoid startling me.