Page 51 of Maksym

Blood welled dark and immediate. The scent hit me. My entire body arched toward it.

Maksym’s arm held steady around my back, not keeping me away but keeping me from falling into the hunger so fast I lost myself.

“Grace,” he said.

“I know,” I breathed. “I’m here.”

He brought his wrist to my lips.

The first touch of his blood was not like the wine. It was life in liquid form not dressed as table drink. My mouth closed over the wound. Heat flooded my tongue, my throat, my chest. My fangs dropped. There was no other word for it.

They descended with a pressure I felt all the way to the base of my skull, a deep ache releasing into sharpness. I made a sound against his skin, startled and ashamed, and hungry. Maksym’s fingers flexed once against my back, then stilled.

“Good,” he murmured. “Now the venom. You can feel it.”

I could. God help me, I could.

Not liquid exactly. Not saliva. A subtle gathering beneath my tongue and near the roots of my fangs, a sweetness that was not taste but intention. I thought of opening a valve. Of permitting rather than forcing. Of making the wound not a wound only.

Then I bit. Maksym inhaled.

His body tightened beneath me, one controlled line of reaction. I almost pulled away, but his voice came low against my hair.

“Good. You did it. Drink.”

So I drank. His blood moved through me like something ancient and enormous waking under snow.

It was not a vision exactly. I did not leave the room. I did not cease to feel his lap beneath me, or his wrist at my mouth, or his arm around my back. But impressions came with the blood, too large to be memories and too intimate to be imagination. Mountains under moonlight. Snowfields blue with dawn.

I drank more. The hollow places inside me filled. Not gently. With force. With command. His blood did not ask my body whether it wished to be alive. It declared life, and my body obeyed.

Warmth pooled low in my belly. My hips shifted against his lap before I chose the movement. Pleasure sparked low and immediate, and I froze around the wrist in my mouth.

Maksym’s breath moved through my hair.

“Take from me,” he said, voice rough now, but still controlled. “Let yourself feel good. You do not have to give anything back.”

The words entered me through blood and skin.

You do not have to give anything back.

My eyes burned. I drank again. My hips moved.

This time I felt the movement fully: the drag of my body over his, the pressure gathering where I was suddenly, shockingly sensitive, the hard length of him beneath me. He was aroused. There was no mistaking it. The knowledge should have thrown me into panic.

It did not. Because his hands did not change. He did not grip my hips. Did not guide. Did not take my response as permission to begin collecting on it. His arm stayed where it had been, a brace against my back. His other hand remained at my mouth.

I rocked against him and drank.

The pleasure built with frightening speed. My body had been asleep in that way for so long I had mistaken numbness for death. Now it woke all at once, confused and furious and ravenous, taking pleasure from blood, pressure, permission, the impossible safety of not being pushed further than I had chosen to go.

I whimpered against his wrist.

“Good,” Maksym whispered. “That is yours. Let it be yours.”

That was what broke me. Not his blood. Not the hunger. Not even the pressure between my thighs.

Yours.