Chapter 3 #4
She’s a vampire. I know it the instant I see her, the composure of her, the cool that comes off her into the overheated air I’m throwing. Dark-haired. Controlled in a way that looks like it costs. She looks at the blood on me and doesn’t flinch.
I don’t know her face.
And then I do.
I’ve seen it before, from the inside. The night Maximus bared his throat and asked me to know all of him, I lived his history with the blood, and I’ve carried it since.
A woman laughing in candlelight. The hope of it.
Then the same face going slack, going feral, the recognition that he’d have to be the one to end it.
A blade through a heart. Eyes that didn’t know him.
The woman in front of me has that face.
Oh, no.
No, no, no.
The memory keeps coming. Deeper now. The same woman thinner, fever-bright, coughing into linen, dying by inches of a thing no money could cure.
The choice he made to keep her. Her first feeding, and the wrongness in it that nobody caught until the wrongness was all that was left of her.
Before all of it, the hope in his face when he looked at her.
A hope I recognize because he wore the same one the night he first looked at me, and the understanding that I am not his first hope but his second lands in my chest and stays there.
His hands holding the blade. The blade going in. The moment he felt her stop.
He’s lived with this. Every day. Every year.
The understanding catches up a beat too late. The first person he let himself love after what Luciano did to him, and the grief of losing her, and both of those things are standing in front of me in a sealed room, breathing air she should not be breathing.
“Catherine,” I say.
I’ve heard Maximus say it twice, and both times it cost him, and the name in my mouth is different from the name in his, because I’m saying it to a living face.
Her composure shifts, the first crack. “He told you about me,” she says.
“He thinks he killed you.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “He’s lived with it ever since.”
A look crosses her face I can’t read and don’t have room to try, and she says, low, “Then he believed a lie. Konstantin made sure of it.” She looks past me toward the wrecked corridors, toward the war I just walked through to reach her. “Is he here?”
I don’t have to ask who she means.
Maximus finds me in the corridor. First, before anything, the same as after every fight.
He comes around the corner with the strike still on him, shadows not yet fully back under his skin, blood on his gear.
And the second he sees me his whole body changes, and what’s left is the man who does this after every fight, before a single word about the mission.
His hands come to my face. He turns it toward the light, reading me for damage I’m not wearing on the outside. Then one hand drops, flat, to my stomach, over the two of them. The other question.
“I’m fine,” I say.
It isn’t true and the bond is telling him that, the cost rolling off me.
The fever is high. My hold on the power is thin.
The blade-cut across my ribs is healed but the ache remains.
And underneath all of it the twins are awake and restless and pushing outward with the urgency of two small beings who used their mother as a conduit for devastating force and are not yet finished with the experience.
“Their power surged three times. The first two I caught and turned on the garrison. The third wasn’t me at all. The twins tore a crossbow bolt out of the air behind my back before I ever saw the shooter.” A breath. “The team’s clear. And your children just saved my life.”
“I felt it.” His thumb moves once over my cheekbone. “I know.”
He doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t reach for the comms, doesn’t ask for the sweep report, doesn’t do a single one of the hundred operational things a commander does the instant a site goes quiet. He holds my face in the wreckage and lets the war wait, and he lets nothing else wait.
“There’s something else,” I say, and I’m still hunting for the words, for how you tell a man that the woman he loved and killed is alive, when the comms crackle.
Marcellus’s voice comes through, careful in a way I haven’t heard from Marcellus.
“Maximus.” A pause. “We found a captive in the eastern structure. A woman.” Another pause. “She’s asking for you. By name.”
His eyes come back to me, searching, because the bond is wide open between us and everything I carried out of that sealed room is pouring across it, and the bond gives him the grief and won’t give him the name.
I stop hunting for the words. There’s no kind order to put them in. There’s only the name.
“It’s Catherine,” I say. “She’s alive.”
I have learned this face. I know the controlled expression. I know what lives under it. I know where the command stops and the grief starts.
I watch every defense he has ever built meet a thing none of them were built for, in the half second before he locks it down.
The recognition. The impossibility. The name that has been a dead woman’s name since the night he put a blade through her heart, alive at the end of a corridor, asking for him.