Page 46 of Maksym

Grace was no longer against my chest. I sensed her breathing change, and that woke me fully.

Chapter 7

Grace

The bedchamber should have been nearly pitch-black. Heavy curtains sealed the early evening outside. No lamp burned. The fire had gone to ash in the hearth, leaving only a faint red memory buried under gray.

Still, I saw everything.

Not vaguely. Not the way human eyes adjusted after a few minutes and made hopeful shapes out of shadows. I saw the gold thread running through the drapes where some patient hand had embroidered vines into the fabric. I saw the grain of the armoire across the room, the slight warp near one carved foot where wood had once swollen with damp and been repaired. I saw the fine seam in the ceiling where old stone met newer work. I saw dust gathered along the edge of a frame on the wall, each mote distinct and offensive in its clarity.

My first thought was not wonder. It was evidence.

Something had been done to my eyes. To the mechanism of light. To the law by which darkness had always meant not seeing. I looked down and realized my robe had loosened in sleep.

The lapels had fallen open enough to expose the slope of my shoulder, the pale line of collarbone, the upper curve of a breast that had been bitten often enough I had learned not to think of it as mine. I pulled the robe shut with both hands so quickly the fabric whispered against my skin.

Then I froze. My skin.

I stared at my own chest where the robe gaped between my fists. The bruises that had covered me the night before—purple, black, yellow, swollen proof of hands and mouths and punishment—had faded into faint discolorations, as if they belonged to someone whose injuries had been weeks old, not hours. The lacerations along my ribs had closed. The torn places around my wrists had become thin pale lines. Bite marks that should have remained red and ugly had softened to silver-pink shadows against skin that looked almost luminous in the dark.

Almost pretty. The thought made me want to crawl out of my own body.

My body was erasing the record faster than my mind could bear to review it. By tomorrow, would there be anything left to prove what had happened? Anything other than memory, and memory had always been the first witness powerful men tried to discredit.

My hand went to my throat. The worst bite was gone.

Not gone. Changed. A faint tenderness remained beneath my fingertips, a place where Maksym’s mouth had been, and Lucian’s had been before him, and others before that. All of them collapsed into one unbearable geography. I swallowed.

My throat burned. That was when I remembered I was not alone. I turned my head. Maksym slept beside me.

He had not moved toward me in sleep. That was the first thing I noticed, because my body noticed everything. He lay on his back at a slight angle, his head turned toward me, black hair loose against the pillow. His body was close enough that I could feel the old cold-mountain scent of him in the sheets, but his hands were nowhere near me. One rested on his own abdomen. The other lay open on the mattress at his side, palm up, fingers relaxed.

Not touching. Exactly as he had promised. The fact should not have mattered. It did.

He looked different asleep. Not harmless. Men like him did not become harmless because their eyes closed. Even at rest there was too much strength in the length of him, too much control built into the bones. But the severe line of his mouth had softened, and exhaustion had left faint shadows beneath his eyes.

My attention moved to the nightstand. There was a full glass of blood wine waiting there. The glass had been placed within easy reach. Near enough that if I woke desperate, I would not need to search. Far enough that I still had to choose.

The hunger saw it before I did. It rose through me with a brutal, bodily certainty. Not the hunger of two years of starvation, though that memory stirred beneath it like an old dog lifting its head. This was sharper. Cleaner. It burned through my throat and under my tongue, pulling at the center of my chest as if someone had set a hook behind my sternum and begun to draw me forward by inches.

Blood. My fingers tightened around the robe.

No.

I would not lunge. I would not scramble across silk like an animal. I would not prove every monstrous thing Lucian had ever said about appetite and power and the truth of what lived beneath civilized skin.

I reached for the glass deliberately. Measured. Slow. One hand braced on the mattress, the other extending with the care of a woman disarming an explosive device. My fingers closed around it. Crystal. Cool. Fragile. I lifted it without spilling a drop.

Then I brought it to my lips. The first taste hit my tongue, and the burn in my throat loosened like a fist opening.

I inhaled sharply through my nose. The scent flooded me—iron, dark fruit, old wine, something faintly herbal beneath it. My gums ached. My mouth changed. I felt pressure beneath my canine teeth, deep and strange, as if bones had remembered a shape they had never had before.

I drank again. Deeper. The blood wine slid down my throat, and my body accepted it with humiliating gratitude. Heat moved outward from my chest. The trembling in my hands eased. The hollow, clawing place inside me quieted by a fraction, then demanded more because a fraction was an insult.

I tilted the glass higher.

“Slow down, Grace, or you’ll make yourself sick.”