Page 83 of Maksym

His smile was fixed in place. Cruel. Beautiful, if you believed symmetry had moral value. It did not.

“Gracelyn Marlow,” he said, tasting my name as if it belonged to him. “Assistant United States Attorney. Vanderbilt. Order of the Coif. Law Review. Federal clerkship.” He clicked his tongue softly. “You collected titles like charms against the dark.”

I pulled at the chains again. Iron answered.

He moved in a slow circle around me, close enough that I could hear the soft brush of his shoes over stone. He did not hurry. Lucian never hurried when he had made a room into a trap.

“And yet here you are,” he continued. “A woman who prosecuted trafficking cases for the federal government, chained like inventory in the dark.”

My stomach turned.

“Stop.”

The word scraped out of me.

He smiled wider. “Oh, my dear. You were never as clever as you believed. Clever women are charming until they mistake attention for danger. You saw a few patterns in paper and imagined yourself a hunter.”

He stepped closer.

“I let you follow the thread.”

“No.”

“Yes,” he whispered. “You were useful. A lesson. A joke told properly requires patience.”

His hands lifted. I watched his fingernails lengthen into curved black claws.

That was wrong and right at once. I had seen his nails sharpen before feeding, before punishment, before he wanted his hands to become more honest than his face. In the chamber, under the amber light, they looked like hooks carved from night.

My breathing came too fast.

I hated that most. Not the fear itself. The evidence of it. The way my body testified against me before the first blow landed.

Lucian placed both hands on my waist.

“No,” I said again, but it was smaller now.

He gripped. The claws punctured flesh.

Pain arrived in separate points at first, bright and exact, then widened as he pressed deeper. Blood slid down my sides, warm over cold skin, then dropped onto the stone beneath my feet. I heard it land. Small sounds. Obscene sounds. Evidence marking itself where no court would see.

“You do bruise so prettily,” he said.

I tried to twist away. The chains snapped tight. My shoulder screamed. His claws held. My body could not decide which injury deserved priority, so it gave all of them the floor.

His face came close to mine.

“I wonder,” he murmured, “if the great prosecutor will argue her way out this time.”

I spat in his face. Or tried to. In dreams, defiance obeyed different physics. It did not matter. His smile sharpened.

“There she is.”

He released my waist only to catch my jaw, forcing my head aside. His fingers were slick with my blood. The smell of it thickened the room until I could taste copper at the back of my throat.

“Please,” I heard myself say.

I hated that too.