Page 11 of Maksym

The dark-haired one shifted between us.

His arm came up, not toward me, but across the path between the other vampire and the bed. His body became a wall. A beautiful, blood-marked wall with fangs and amber eyes, and power gathering around him like night.

“Stop,” he said.

The word cracked clean through the room.

Then, even lower, “Taras, don’t come closer.”

The silver-haired man’s expression tightened. I could not tell if he was offended or worried, or merely tired of obeying. I caught one word, spoken by him or the other—I was not sure at first.

Taras.

A name. Not safety. Names had never made monsters less monstrous. Lucian had a name. The guard had a name once, though I had tried hard to forget it. Everyone who hurt you had a mother’s word attached to them somewhere.

Taras did not come closer.

The dark-haired one did not look back at me. He kept himself angled between us, broad shoulders rigid, one hand still lifted in warning. The air in the room seemed to bend around his restraint. I could feel how badly he wanted to move. Towards me, maybe. Toward Taras. Toward violence. It was impossible to know.

My chest heaved.

I did not need air the way I had before. Some new instinct knew that. My lungs kept dragging it in anyway, because fear was older than biology, and mine had been well-trained.

I stared at the vampire shielding me from the other vampire.

My throat throbbed where his teeth had been. My mouth still tasted of his blood. My body was warm for the first time in longer than I could remember, and that warmth had come from him. So had the command that had stolen my swallow. So had the bite. So had whatever had happened inside me that made the room too bright and every sound too sharp and my own skin no longer feel entirely human.

I did not understand why the monster stood between me and danger. I understood why that made the terror worse.

Because if he were only cruel, I knew what to do with him inside my head. Hate was clean. Fear was clean. But this—this contradiction with blood on his mouth and protection in his stance—had no place in the world I had survived.

So I curled tighter against the broken headboard, held my ruined wrists to my chest, and waited for the trick to reveal itself.

Chapter 3

Grace

The woman’s voice did what neither man’s stillness had managed.

It entered the room without force and made force seem suddenly embarrassing.

“Majesty.”

One word, warm and unhurried, spoken from the doorway as if she had found someone tracking mud across a clean kitchen rather than two vampires poised on either side of a violence I did not understand. The cadence of it pulled at some buried place in me before I could defend against it. Not my grandmother’s voice. Not even close. This woman’s accent carried old countries in its hems, soft European edges where my grandmother’s had carried Tennessee hills and scripture and black coffee. But the authority was the same kind.

The kind that did not need to prove itself.

Both men changed.

Not much. The dark-haired one—Maksym, I had heard the silver-haired one say—did not move away from me. Taras did not step closer. But something in the room lowered by a fraction, like hackles smoothing under a hand that knew exactly where to touch.

I looked toward the door.

She was small compared to them. Almost everyone would have been, but her smallness was not weakness. She had black and silver-streaked hair pinned in a bun, though pieces had escaped and curled softly around her face. She wore a dark dressing robe tied neatly at the waist. Her cheeks were full, her body gently rounded, her presence so ordinary and impossible in that room that my mind did not know where to put her.

No one had told me kindness could survive among monsters. I did not trust it.

She stepped inside anyway.