Page 42 of Maksym

“Quietly?”

“As quietly as Taras does anything, which is to say the dead will feel under-prepared.”

A faint exhale touched the line. Not laughter. Not quite. But something shifted.

“Good, keep him close.”

“I intend to.”

“And your mate?”

The question landed with unexpected force. I sat slowly. The chair creaked beneath me.

“She was human when I found her,” I said.

“Was.”

“Yes.”

He did not ask why. He knew me too well. Or perhaps he knew the bond.

“She was dying,” I continued. “Minutes at most. Starved. Exsanguinated. Injuries layered over injuries. She said, blood slave. She said, please when I told her I could help.”

My throat tightened around the next part.

“I turned her.”

My father said nothing.

“I compelled her to swallow when the transition began. She knows. I told her. She understands enough to hate the violation and enough to know she wanted to live.”

“And what state is she in now?”

“Clean. Fed. Terrified. Furious. Intelligent enough to make that dangerous for anyone trying to lie to her. She spent two years being drained and abused by vampires and woke as one. She despises what she has become because everything she knows about us was taught by monsters.”

I looked toward the door, though there was no one there.

“She flinches if I reach. She accepted Millie’s touch. She asks questions when she is afraid. She has no family. No one living. Lucian took two years and left her with nothing familiar inside her own body.”

The words cost more than I expected.

I had delivered casualty reports before. I had informed families of sons lost in border wars, sent notices of executions, told allies which houses had fallen and which names would be erased. None of that prepared me to summarize Grace as if any statement could contain what had been done to her.

Kazimir remained quiet long enough that I heard the lamp hum.

When he spoke again, the formal cadence remained, but something beneath it had altered. Less king. More father. More man who knew what the mate bond could give and what its absence could take.

“The bond does not ask permission,” he said.

“No.”

“It does not care about timing. It does not weigh whether either soul is prepared to bear it.”

I closed my eyes. Behind them, I saw Grace in the chair, robe gathered in her fists, asking if she could still practice law.

“She thinks fate has a cruel sense of humor,” I said.

“Perhaps it does.”