Page 50 of Maksym

Not love. Not acceptance. Something more primitive and less negotiable. Recognition, perhaps, as he had said. My body knew it, and my mind hated that my body had taken testimony without counsel present.

“I need you to walk me through it,” I said.

“Of course.”

“Like I am stupid.”

“You are not.”

“Maksym.”

His mouth softened at the sound of his name. “Like you have never done it before, then.”

“Better.”

“I will open the vein in my wrist and place it against your lips. You drink first. Your fangs will descend. You will feel them. Do not fight the sensation.”

My hand curled in his shirt without permission. He glanced down at it, then back at my face.

“You will pay attention to what happens in your mouth,” he continued. “There is venom. It is instinctive, but you can learn to control it. Before you bite, you will feel the instinct; you need to will it through.”

“Will it through.”

“Yes.”

“That is not a medically precise instruction.”

“No. It is a true one.”

I absorbed that unhappily.

“What happens if I don’t?”

“You may tear me.”

My eyes snapped to his.

“I could hurt you?”

“Yes.”

He did not soften it. Did not insult me by pretending otherwise.

“A bite tears flesh,” he said. “It hurts. Venom changes what comes after the piercing. It makes the pain brief and then turns it into pleasure.”

The room went utterly still. Not outside. Not in the palace. In me. Two years rearranged themselves in one sentence.

Bites. So many bites. Teeth tearing into me while I screamed or went silent or left my body because remaining in it was too expensive. Lucian’s mouth at my throat. Others at my wrists. My thighs. My breasts. Pain that stayed pain because they wanted it that way. Because they could have changed it. Because there had been a biological mechanism, a merciful mechanism, and they had withheld it as deliberately as food.

“Those bastards,” I whispered.

Maksym’s face became something terrible.

“Yes,” he said. His accent thickened around the profanity like old iron. “Fucking bastards.”

For reasons I did not want to examine, that helped. He lifted his wrist to his mouth. I watched his fangs descend.

It should have horrified me. It did, in part. But there was also something clean about it, a visible admission of what he was. No glamour, no pretending teeth were anything but teeth. He bit into his own wrist with a controlled precision that made me realize how much skill lived inside violence when someone cared not to be careless.