Page 78 of Maksym

“No.”

She closed her eyes for half a second. “All right. Hit me.”

The phrase made something in my body go still.

Her eyes opened, and she saw it. Of course she did. Grace missed very little when she had decided to look.

“I meant figuratively,” she said, quieter.

“I know.”

The room breathed again, though only by a fraction.

I turned the laptop slightly, closing the Council document and opening the file Taras had prepared on household members traveling between Nevada and Philadelphia.

“In Philadelphia,” I said, “you will be at the Kozlov estate. My father’s principal residence in this country. It is heavily warded. Club Obsidian, more so, though more... public in its function.”

“Public,” Grace repeated. “As a supernatural pleasure club and casino.”

“Yes.”

“I am adjusting my vocabulary one crisis at a time.”

“You will meet my father,” I continued.

Grace’s fingers moved again.

“You will meet my youngest brother Bohdan, who runs Obsidian. He is the least serious of us all. But do not be fooled. He is no less a Kozlov in all ways. Meaning he may seem lighthearted, but he is lethal.”

“I will take that under advisement.”

“You will also meet my sister, Lucia.”

At that, Taras’s attention shifted. Not obviously. Not to anyone who did not know how to read a Kozlov when blood was mentioned. But I felt it, the small inward turn all of us made around Lucia. Our father’s daughter. Our blade. Our wound.

“Lucia is thirty,” I said. “She has served at my father’s right hand most of her adult life. She is formidable. Direct. Protective to the point of brutality when necessary.”

Grace looked up. “That sounded affectionate.”

“It was.”

“Good to know your family compliments people like indictments.”

“She would consider that one.”

That almost earned me a smile.

“Lucia’s mate is Ryder Lowrey,” I said. “He is a wolf shifter from Iron Valor. A physician. Most call him Doc.”

Grace’s fingers paused again. “An Iron Valor wolf. Again. And a physician named Doc. Of course.”

“He is also the first wolf-vampire hybrid in over a century.”

This time, she stopped typing entirely.

There were many reactions a person might have had to such a sentence. Fear. Disbelief. Laughter. Denial. Grace went still in the way she had when evidence changed the shape of a case.

“Hybrid,” she said.