Page 96 of Kazimir

No battle. No music. No divine voice vibrating through marrow. Only the ruined quiet of a club that had hosted judgment and survived.

I stood in the middle of it held against Kazimir’s blood-streaked chest, trying to understand a world in which the Creator had called me beloved and the Goddess had blessed my bond with a vampire king while demons and wolves watched from a pleasure house in Philadelphia.

“I feel,” Amelia said faintly into the silence, “like I may need to sit down for a hundred years.”

The line was so normal, so profane in its timing, that something in the room loosened all at once.

A breath of laughter moved through the wreckage. Shaky. Disbelieving. Human, even from those who were not.

Ryder barked out a hoarse laugh and then pressed a hand to his side with a grimace. “I vote we start with triage before the century.” His Iron Valor brothers stood dressed in Obsidian-branded robes beside him.

Lucia wiped blood from her cheek with the back of her hand. “For once, I agree with him immediately.”

Archon’s mouth curved, just barely. “A wise policy.”

The ordinary words landed like small anchors thrown into deep water. Around us, people began moving again. Not quickly. Carefully, as if moving too fast might make what had happened less real. Witches checked ward lines. Security started helping the injured. One of the demons sat down very hard on the nearest intact chair and muttered something that sounded like a promise to improve his behavior, at least for the week.

Kazimir still had not let me go.

He drew back just enough to look at my throat, and the blackness in his eyes sharpened with fresh rage at the bruising there. His fingers hovered near the marks, not touching until I nodded. Even then he touched as if my skin might break.

“He held you,” he said, voice roughened beyond his usual control.

“Yes.”

The word trembled more than I liked.

His jaw flexed. Through the bond, I felt the vivid afterimage of what he had wanted to do to Sariel with his own hands. It was not civilized. I loved him for it.

“But he failed,” I said.

Those black eyes lifted to mine.

“Yes,” he said. “He failed.”

Only then did I remember my sword.

I looked down the corridor and saw it lying where Sariel had sent it spinning, the gold of it dimmed now to a patient gleam under the damaged hall lights. Kazimir followed my gaze. Without taking his arm from around me, he extended his free hand. The sword slid over the blood-marked floor, metal whispering softly, and came to him hilt-first. He offered it to me.

I took it.

The grip fit my palm with the same sure rightness as before, but now there was more in it—witness, survival, the knowledge that it had not failed me even when I had been over-matched. I rested the point lightly on the floor and exhaled.

“My name is Devon Wade,” I said softly, mostly to myself.

Kazimir heard anyway. Of course he did.

His hand tightened around my waist. “Yes,” he said, with a certainty that made the bruises feel less central to my body than they had a moment before. “It is, but I’d very much like for it to become Devon Wade-Kozlov at a time of your choosing.”

My breath caught, and I looked into his beautiful, still-darkened eyes.

“When Obsidian is restored, we’ll have the ceremony.”

He simply nodded and placed a kiss on my forehead.

Around us, Obsidian breathed back into itself by degrees. The walls still pulsed faintly with ward light, though calmer now. Broken furniture would need replacing. Blood would need cleaning. Reports would be written. The injured would be treated. Explanations, partial and careful, would eventually be crafted for those who required them. Life would resume because that was what living places did after surviving the impossible.

But not yet.