3. Chapter 3 #2
A laugh scraped out of me before I could stop it. It sounded awful.
“No, I’m not.”
It was the first full sentence I had spoken since giving my name. Millie’s eyes came back to mine.
“My dear,” she said gently, “you are sitting upright after surviving what should have killed you several times over. We shall not be stingy with credit.”
I felt something under my breastbone shake once, hard, like a door kicked from the other side.
Millie helped me into the bath.
The water closed around my feet first, then calves, knees, thighs. Heat struck the bites and split skin with a bright sting that made me grip her forearm. She let me. Her sleeve bunched under my fingers. I expected her to pull away when my nails dug in.
She did not.
“Breathe,” she murmured. “In if you wish. Out if you can. That is all.”
I lowered myself inch by inch until the water held my hips, my ribs, my shoulders.
The salts burned at first. Then, slowly, the burn changed.
Not gone. Nothing was gone. But softened around the edges.
The water took the weight of my limbs, and for the first time since waking under his mouth, I felt something like gravity loosen its claim.
My hair floated in dark tangles around me. Millie knelt beside the tub and rolled up her sleeves.
“I am going to wash your hair now,” she said. “You may tell me to stop.”
I did not believe I could tell anyone to stop and have it matter.
Still, I whispered, “All right.”
She used a cup first, pouring warm water carefully over my scalp, shielding my eyes with one hand. The first rinse turned brownish-red as it ran down my shoulders. Dirt, blood, alley grime, old sweat. I watched it curl into the bathwater and felt shame rise hot and useless in my throat.
Millie reached for a bottle and worked soap between her palms. Her fingers touched my scalp. I went still. No one had touched my hair kindly since my grandmother died. That was the thought that ruined me.
Not the bite. Not the blood. Not the king in the next room.
Not the impossible fact that my body had become something I could not yet name.
It was Millie’s fingers easing into the knots with patient care, refusing to yank, refusing to curse the tangles, simply working through what neglect and terror had made.
My grandmother used to comb my hair on Sunday nights.
She would sit in the old kitchen chair with me on a pillow at her feet, a towel around my shoulders, telling me stories about women in our family who buried husbands, raised children, planted beans, carried shotguns, and never once asked the world to be gentle before they survived it.
I had survived. I had not survived cleanly. Maybe nobody did. Tears slid down my face, quiet at first, then faster. They fell from my chin into the bathwater and vanished.
“There now,” Millie said, not as comfort exactly, but as acknowledgment. “There you are.”
I covered my mouth with one wet hand. My shoulders shook. I did not want Maksym to hear me through the door. Then I remembered I had heard heartbeats in another room and knew, with a sick certainty, that he could hear every breath if he wanted.
That made me cry harder.
Millie rinsed my hair with the handheld faucet, warm water running clean, then cleaner. She did not rush me out of tears. She did not tell me I was brave. Bravery was too heavy a thing to hand someone while they were naked in a stranger’s bathtub.
After a while, when my breathing had become less jagged, she spoke.
“His Majesty turned you.”
The words landed in the water between us. I stared at the gold drain near my feet.
Turned.
I knew the word. Of course I knew it. I had heard vampires use it the way wealthy people discussed buying property.
Rarely. Carefully. Sometimes with disdain.
Humans were food, entertainment, leverage.
Turning one required purpose. Permission.
Power. Lucian had once told me he would never turn me because eternity would give me too many opportunities to become inconvenient.
My hand moved to my throat. Millie watched me.
“You were dying,” she said. “I do not say that to excuse everything. I say it because it is true. Your body could not have survived what had been done to it much longer. Minutes, perhaps. Not hours.”
“I’m not human,” I said.
My voice sounded small in the marble room.
“No,” Millie said. “Not anymore.”
I waited for the scream to come. It did not.
Something worse came instead: a cold, flat space where the scream should have been. My body knew the truth even while my mind stood back from it in horror.
He had made me one of them. The thing I hated. The thing that had fed from me until there was almost nothing left to feed from. My fingers curled under the water.
“I didn’t want this.”
“I know.”
The answer was immediate. I looked at her then. Millie’s face held no argument. No defense of him. No offended loyalty demanding gratitude from me like a tax.
“I don’t know what you said to him,” she continued.
“I do not know what choices were possible in the seconds he had. Those are matters he must answer for himself. But you are allowed to hate this. You are allowed to grieve what was taken. Being saved does not mean you have to be grateful for the shape of the rescue.”
That sentence moved through me slowly.
Being saved does not mean you have to be grateful for the shape of the rescue.
“All vampires are monsters,” I whispered.
The words came out more exhausted than fierce. Millie dipped a cloth in the water and wrung it out.
“You have every reason to believe that.”
I looked at her sharply. She washed my shoulder with careful strokes, avoiding the worst bites except to let water pass over them.
“I will not tell you that what you know is false,” she said. “You know what was done to you. You know the ones who did it. If someone tried to talk me out of my own suffering, I would bite them, and I am considered very polite.”
Despite everything, a broken breath left me. Almost a laugh. Not quite. Millie’s mouth curved faintly, then softened again.
“But no,” she said. “It is not true of all of us.”
All of us. I went still. She looked at me directly.
“I am a vampire, Grace.”
My hand tightened on the side of the tub.
I should have known. The warmth of her hands had fooled me, or I had let it. The scent of blood beneath lavender. The way Maksym obeyed her. The fact that she moved through this hidden palace as if age and death had both become matters she had settled long ago.
My body prepared for fear. It did not arrive fully. Millie held up the cloth between us like evidence.
“I am a vampire,” she repeated. “And I am here washing your hair because you needed someone to do it gently. Both things are true.”
Both things are true.
I stared at her until my eyes blurred again.