Page 94 of Maksym

My father lifted his head.

“That’s better,” he said.

Devon’s eyes had softened to storm-lit turquoise. Then she seemed to remember us.

“Oh! Hello.” She stepped away from Kazimir, though his hand remained lightly on her back. “You must be Grace.”

My father turned with courtly calm, as if his wife had not arrived armed, swearing, frosting-covered, and accompanied by a hellhound with dessert on his fangs.

“Grace,” he said, “this is my wife, Devon Wade Kozlov.”

Grace did not answer immediately. She was looking at Devon.

I had seen humans look at beauty before. I had watched patrons stare at vampires, demons, witches drunk on their own power. This was not that. Grace looked as if something in her recognized the outline of holiness and did not know whether to trust its survival in a room full of monsters.

Devon’s understanding eyes met hers, and she smiled softly.

“Don’t mind Axiom,” she said. “He looks terrible, but he has very strong feelings about pastries and very poor manners.”

Axiom huffed smoke.

Then Grace did something no intelligence briefing, no mate bond, no centuries of strategic thought could have prepared me for.

She bent down to him.

“Grace,” I said, already moving.

But she had placed one hand palm-up and had fixed her entire attention on the hellhound.

“Well, look at you,” she cooed, in a voice I had never heard from her and would have once sworn impossible. “Aren’t you just the most beautiful boy? Yes, you are. You are a terrifying baby with frosting on your murder face.”

The foyer became silent. Utterly silent.

Even Tilden’s expression altered, which in another century would have signaled an approaching political collapse.

Grace leaned slightly forward, her hand still open, fingers relaxed.

“Aren’t you handsome? Such a good boy. Such a big, scary sweetheart. Did somebody give you a cinnamon roll? Did they? Was that your snack? I bet it was. I bet you deserved it.”

Axiom lowered his enormous head toward her hand. Every instinct I possessed detonated. I stepped forward to pull her back. My father’s hand closed around my arm. Firm. Absolute. A stay of execution delivered through fingers that had held empires still.

I looked at him. His pale eyes did not leave the hellhound. He mouthed the word, “Wait.”

Axiom’s nose hovered above Grace’s palm. It was the size of a dinner plate, black and wet and smoking faintly at the nostrils. His teeth could have closed around her wrist and removed it before even I could cross the distance.

Grace did not tremble.

The bond did. It pulled at me with such violence that my fangs pressed down before I forced them back. Mine, some ancient animal part of me snarled. Mine to guard. Mine to shield. Mine to carry away from teeth and fire and every risk she did not understand.

But she did understand risk. That was the problem.

Grace knew exactly what monsters could do. She had crawled from one. And still she held out her hand to another because Devon had told her not to mind him, and perhaps Grace had decided she would choose for herself which beasts deserved fear.

Axiom sniffed her palm. Then he pushed his enormous head beneath her hand. Grace’s face changed.

“Oh,” she whispered.

Her fingers settled between his ears. The hellhound’s eyes half-closed.