Page 229 of Maksym

No one spoke. We did not need to.

There were moments in any ruling family when affection, hierarchy, vengeance, and law stood in the same room and waited to see which name history would give the act that followed. I had lived long enough to know history usually chose poorly. It liked clean labels. Execution. Revenge. Justice. Murder. It disliked admitting that the oldest acts often wore several truths at once.

Lucian Devereaux hung on the far wall.

The sight of him produced no satisfaction in me at first. Satisfaction required distance. I had none. The chains that held him were fixed into the rock by black iron rings old enough to have restrained things less civilized and more honest than he had ever been. His arms were spread above shoulder height, wrists shackled in runed cuffs that drank the strength from any compulsion he attempted to summon. More shackles held his ankles apart, high enough that he had to bear weight on the balls of his feet or sag against his shoulders.

He had been stripped of every piece of finery.

No dark robes. No careful tailoring. No jeweled cufflinks, no polished boots, no silk at the throat. Only sagging, dirty underwear remained, gray-white cloth stained by the indignities of transport and fear. His aristocratic body looked smaller without costume. Not frail. Lucian had old blood enough to keep the lines of him hard beneath the humiliation. But reduced, certainly. Translated from monster to meat.

Alistaire Crowe hung several paces away.

His head sagged forward, chin nearly to chest, hair falling over his face. He seemed to have surrendered to collapse where the restraints allowed it. His body was pale in the bad light, his shoulders trembling now and then with exhaustion or fear. I did not know whether he had wept. I did not care. Some men discovered remorse only when consequence entered the room with keys. Such remorse was not useless, perhaps, but it was late enough to be irrelevant.

Lucian’s head did not hang.

He raised it the moment we entered, and whatever remained of his voice came at us raw and vicious, torn open by rage and restraint.

“Cowards,” he spat. “All of you. Kozlov butchers hiding beneath legal language. You think this makes you righteous? You think dragging me into your family cellar changes what she is?”

Spittle had gathered at the corner of his mouth. Veins stood out along his neck. His face, usually controlled by vanity and practice, had gone ugly with effort. It startled me, even now, how quickly old monsters became ordinary when elegance failed them.

His eyes found Grace. There was hatred in them, yes. But fear stood behind it, breathing harder.

“You were nothing when I found you,” he hissed. “Nothing. A little mortal prosecutor sniffing around matters above her station. I taught you the shape of the real world, Gracelyn. I taught you what law is worth when no one comes.”

Taras made a sound low in his chest. I lifted one hand without looking at him. He stopped. Barely.

Lucian laughed, or tried to. It came out wet and sharp. “Ah, is the loyal brute offended? How touching. How very provincial. Tell me, Maksym, do you enjoy wearing another man’s leavings as a crown?”

My shadows moved.

Not outward. Not yet. They shifted beneath my skin like water under ice, looking for permission. I did not grant it. Lucian wanted reaction. Words were all he had left, and he flung them as men flung stones from behind broken gates.

Grace stood very still.

If the words entered her, they did not find purchase where he hoped. The bond did not flare with shame. It did not recoil. I felt irritation, yes, and a precise, almost judicial impatience.

Lucian kept speaking.

He could not stop. That was the thing about cowards: when silence began to look like a room with no exits. They filled it because they feared what might enter if they did not.

“You think funds and records and sanctimonious little speeches make you clean?” he snarled. “You are blood-drunk on Kozlov power. A pet turned pretty and told she is a queen because her master enjoys dressing damage in velvet.”

Grace exhaled through her nose. Then she turned to me. Not dramatically. Not with tears. Not wounded. Merely annoyed.

“Maksym,” she said.

My name in her Southern mouth still had the power to make all my violence kneel.

“Yes?”

She glanced once toward Lucian, then back to me. “I have some things I’d like to explain to him.” Her drawl thickened around the words, not from distress, but choice. “But his nonsense is making that impossible.”

Lucian’s mouth curled. Grace did not look at him.

“Could you compel him to shut the hell up?”