Page 143 of Maksym

She did.

The bed shifted beneath us. The headboard struck the wall once before the house wards cushioned the sound. Grace’s body moved with mine as if some part of her had known this rhythm before either of us existed and had merely been waiting for us to catch up.

I lowered my mouth to her ear.

“I am going to feed from you.”

Her eyes opened. No fear. She tipped her neck to me. The offering nearly ended me.

My fangs descended. Venom flooded my mouth. I kissed her throat first, the old marks, the new skin, the pulse that had once nearly stopped beneath my hand outside Amethyst.

Then I bit. Her blood hit my tongue. Definition failed.

Royal reserve, ancient vintages, bloodlines curated over centuries—ashes and dust compared to this. Grace’s blood carried mountain rain and terror survived, honeysuckle and courtroom steel, grief, hunger, fury, law, lonely scholarship, grandmother’s hands, chains broken, and the impossible sweetness of a mate who had chosen my mouth at her throat.

My venom entered her. She came apart beneath me.

Her orgasm began as a cry and became something too vast for sound. Her body seized around my cock, clenching in endless waves. The bond flooded open, oceans of sensation pouring through us: her pleasure, mine, hunger feeding hunger, my release dragged from me with such force that I buried myself deep and spilled inside her at once.

I groaned against her throat.

Still, she pulsed around me. Still, I drank.

Not too much. Never too much. But enough that the bond burned white-hot, enough that my shadows rose along the walls like wings before I forced them down.

I released her neck and sealed the wounds with my tongue.

Then I remained above her, trembling.

I, who had stood against armies without shaking.

Grace’s hands moved slowly over my back. Wonderingly. As if she were confirming I was real, too.

I withdrew with care, swallowing a groan at the way her body tried to keep me. Then I gathered her against my chest and rolled us gently to our sides beneath the coverlet. Her head tucked under my chin. One of her legs slid between mine. She was warm, limp, shaking in small aftershocks that moved through the bond like fading thunder.

I stroked her back. No words came at first.

Words would have been vulgar things just then, little tools clattering onto cathedral stone.

At last, Grace tilted her face up to mine.

Her eyes were dark and bright, and no longer guarded in quite the same way.

“You are everywhere inside me,” she whispered.

I kissed her forehead. Then her mouth.

“Yes, my love,” I said. “And you are in me.”

Chapter 18

Grace

The room held its own quiet around me. Not the predatory quiet of a place waiting to hurt me. Not the airless hush of captivity, where silence was never neutral because it usually meant someone worse than noise was approaching.

My body felt different. That startled me more than the room.

I had grown used to waking as a negotiation with pain. Limbs heavy. Mouth dry. Skin too close to bone. Hunger everywhere, not only in my stomach but in my thinking, thinning every thought until survival became the only sentence my body could complete. Even after Maksym turned me, even after blood restored what Lucian had stolen by degrees, there had been a tightness in me. A coil wound behind my sternum. A readiness to flinch before reason had time to object.