Page 61 of Maksym

Remy’s fingers flexed once.

“Wrong how?” the witch asked.

Grace closed her eyes briefly. “Like sound didn’t travel properly. Like the air stopped at the walls.”

“Warded holding rooms,” Remy said quietly.

Grace opened her eyes. “Yes, well. I called them cells.”

Remy inclined her head. Grace took another sip of coffee from the new mug.

“People came and went. Vampires. Mostly men. Some women. Some looked like business associates. Some like old money. Some like they enjoyed being cruel because it made them feel sophisticated.”

She swallowed.

“One name I heard often was Alistaire Crowe. An Elder. Lucian said his name in front of me more than once. Crowe visited often. He brought others with him.”

Taras wrote the name down. The letters looked like a death sentence even from where I sat.

“Did Crowe feed from you?” I asked.

Grace’s gaze moved to mine. The answer was in the silence before she spoke.

“Yes.”

My vision narrowed. I placed both hands flat on the table and felt the wood groan beneath my palms. I eased the pressure away before it broke. Grace saw that too. I forced my fingers to relax one by one.

She continued.

“I never saw the other slaves.”

Her voice changed on slaves. Just slightly. A hairline fracture in glass.

“I heard them.”

No one breathed. Not even those of us who did not need to.

“Crying through walls. Sometimes screaming. Sometimes praying. Sometimes begging in languages I didn’t know. There was a woman who sang once. Very softly. I thought I was hallucinating her, but one of the guards told her to shut up, so she was real.”

Grace’s eyes had gone bright. The tears did not fall yet.

“I tried to map the place by sound. Footsteps. Doors. Plumbing. Voices. Anything. It was hard because I was hungry most of the time, and after feeding I was weak.”

She stopped. Her throat moved.

“They fed carefully,” she said. “That was part of the system. Never enough to kill. Not unless they meant to discard someone. Rotation. Schedules. Rest periods just long enough to keep the body functional. Iron supplements in food when they remembered food. Broth. Protein. Water. They understood the biology of keeping a human alive as supply.”

The first tear fell. She did not wipe it. It tracked down her cheek, over skin too healed for what she described.

“The bites were deliberate. Wrists when they wanted clean access. Throat when they wanted fear. Inner arm if they had company and wanted fewer visible marks. They knew how to take and take and leave the heart beating.”

I had heard torture before. I had witnessed confession under duress, war reports, the guttural inventory of battlefield suffering. I had seen my father flay liars with words until they begged for blades. None of it compared to the obscenity of Grace’s restraint.

She spoke as though every sentence needed to be admissible.

And still her tears fell.

“They used my blood,” she said.