6. Chapter 6 #2
For one humiliating second, I almost smiled like a boy. Millie saw that too, because Millie missed nothing worth seeing. Her expression warmed, but she spared me by not naming it.
“She needs sleep,” I said.
“She needs many things,” Millie replied. “Sleep is the first among many.”
Taras rose and stepped aside.
Millie turned to Grace’s door, then paused with her hand on the latch. “Majesty.”
The door closed behind her.
My study had been designed to remind visitors that the Western Crown did not conduct business from velvet alone.
Dark wood paneling climbed the walls. Shelves held ledgers, treaties, maps, and sealed boxes containing debts old enough to have outlived nations.
My desk was broad, black, and large enough to hold two enormous monitors and my laptop.
It held no ornaments except a blade-shaped letter opener and a carved gold paperweight.
Taras stopped at the threshold. “I will begin pulling records.”
“Quietly.”
His mouth flattened. “Insulting.”
He vanished down the corridor. For a moment, I stood behind my desk and listened to the house settle toward daylight. I picked up the phone and called my father. He answered on the first ring.
“Son,” he said. “What has happened?”
My father had never required much evidence to detect catastrophe in my silence. Perhaps because he had fathered sons who learned too young to bleed quietly. Perhaps because Kazimir Kozlov had survived nearly nine centuries by knowing which empty spaces hid knives.
I looked toward the window. The sunrise had widened by a blade’s breadth.
“At least one member of your Elder Council has been operating blood slaves,” I said.
The line went silent.
I continued, because intelligence delivered piecemeal could become cowardice. “The operation appears to be active within reach of my territory and in direct violation of Crown law.”
Still nothing. Not absence. Pressure.
My father’s silence had weight even through a receiver. I had watched rooms of ancient creatures confess merely to escape it. I gave him the rest.
“They have been doing it under our noses.”
A breath moved at the other end of the line. Controlled. Measured. Dangerous.
“Who?”
“Lucian Devereux.”
The silence changed.
“There may be more,” I said. “There will be more.”
“Evidence.”
“A woman escaped him and came to Amethyst. She collapsed outside the club. She identified herself as a blood slave before losing consciousness. Physical evidence was extensive. Bite patterns. Malnourishment. Restraint injuries. Long-term abuse. Her knowledge of Devereux is direct.”
My voice did not falter when I gave him the truth that mattered most.
“She is also my mate.”
The receiver carried no sound. Not even a sigh. I watched the first edge of sunlight touch the far boundary wall beyond the glass.
“She was one of them,” I said. “One of his slaves.”
When my father finally spoke, his voice was very soft.
“Your mate was held as a blood slave by my Elder in your kingdom.”
“Yes.”
“This man who sits in council meetings at my table has dared to break my laws?” Kazimir asked.
“It seems he believes he is smarter than we are. Clearly, he has gotten away with his crimes until now.”
“Does he know you have her?”
“No.”
“Make sure it remains so.”
“For the moment.”
“For the moment,” he repeated.
There was no heat in his voice. That was how I knew the fury had gone cold enough to become structural.
“I will come,” he said.
“Not yet.”
The words left my mouth before prudence could dress them differently. Silence again. This time it was aimed at me. I stood behind my desk and accepted it.
“Explain,” my father said.
“Treachery lives in shadows. If you descend on the West with the full weight of your wrath before we know the extent of the network, we will kill Devereux and lose the rest.”
“I did not suggest impatience.”
“No,” I said. “You suggested arrival. In certain contexts, Father, your arrival and war are difficult to distinguish.”
That earned me a pause. Under different circumstances, he might have found it amusing. Under these, he let it pass because it was true.
I continued, steadier now. “My kingdom spans too much territory. Your dominion spans more. No ruler, however vigilant, sees every dark corner at once. This was hidden because men who profit from slavery understand what discovery costs. They buried it carefully. They used status, distance, fear, and money. Perhaps magic. Perhaps legal fronts. Perhaps human institutions.”
The word human nearly caught in my throat, but I forced it through.
“Grace was a federal prosecutor. Complex financial crimes and trafficking. If Devereux targeted her because of her work, or because she came too close to something, the conspiracy may cross both worlds.”
Kazimir did not answer immediately. My father had built power slowly enough to understand patience. But he loved his bloodline with a brutality that made patience a discipline rather than a virtue.
“You defend me,” he said at last.
“I state a fact.”
“I wrote the law.”
“Yes.”
“I made examples.”
“Yes.”
“And still they return to old appetites.”
“They return because appetite does not respect law. Only consequences.”
His voice lowered. “Then consequences shall be made memorable.”
“They will,” I said. “But wide. Every person involved. Every forged document. Every estate. Every donor registry corrupted. Every guard paid to look away. Every Elder who suspected and preferred comfort over truth. If we cut one head from this thing too early, the body scatters.”
The line held silence again, but this one was different. He was absorbing. Reordering. Making room for strategy around fury. Good.
My father had taught me that anger was useful only when harnessed to a foundation. Otherwise, it was merely weather.
“Taras?” he asked.
“Already moving.”
“Quietly?”
“As quietly as Taras does anything, which is to say the dead will feel under-prepared.”
A faint exhale touched the line. Not laughter. Not quite. But something shifted.
“Good, keep him close.”
“I intend to.”
“And your mate?”
The question landed with unexpected force. I sat slowly. The chair creaked beneath me.
“She was human when I found her,” I said.
“Was.”
“Yes.”
He did not ask why. He knew me too well. Or perhaps he knew the bond.
“She was dying,” I continued. “Minutes at most. Starved. Exsanguinated. Injuries layered over injuries. She said, blood slave. She said, please when I told her I could help.”
My throat tightened around the next part.
“I turned her.”
My father said nothing.
“I compelled her to swallow when the transition began. She knows. I told her. She understands enough to hate the violation and enough to know she wanted to live.”
“And what state is she in now?”
“Clean. Fed. Terrified. Furious. Intelligent enough to make that dangerous for anyone trying to lie to her. She spent two years being drained and abused by vampires and woke as one. She despises what she has become because everything she knows about us was taught by monsters.”
I looked toward the door, though there was no one there.
“She flinches if I reach. She accepted Millie’s touch. She asks questions when she is afraid. She has no family. No one living. Lucian took two years and left her with nothing familiar inside her own body.”
The words cost more than I expected.
I had delivered casualty reports before. I had informed families of sons lost in border wars, sent notices of executions, told allies which houses had fallen and which names would be erased. None of that prepared me to summarize Grace as if any statement could contain what had been done to her.
Kazimir remained quiet long enough that I heard the lamp hum.
When he spoke again, the formal cadence remained, but something beneath it had altered. Less king. More father. More man who knew what the mate bond could give and what its absence could take.
“The bond does not ask permission,” he said.
“No.”
“It does not care about timing. It does not weigh whether either soul is prepared to bear it.”
I closed my eyes. Behind them, I saw Grace in the chair, robe gathered in her fists, asking if she could still practice law.
“She thinks fate has a cruel sense of humor,” I said.
“Perhaps it does.”
That answer opened my eyes. My father rarely granted theology the dignity of sincerity. The Creator, The Goddess, fate—he treated them as powers to be acknowledged when useful and defied when necessary.
“But cruelty is not the only possible end,” he continued. “Listen to me, Maksym.”
“I am listening.”
“Good. Then hear what I say and not merely what your instincts dislike. Your bond will demand closeness. It will lie to you in the language of protection. It will tell you that fear is danger, that distance is abandonment, that her pain requires your hands immediately.”
Every word struck too accurately.
“You must not obey every truth it tells you,” he said. “A thing may be true and still not be yours to act upon.”
I said nothing.
“She will find her way to you, or she will not. You cannot drag her across that distance and call it destiny. Patience. Presence. Those are required of you now. Not possession. Not proof. Not grand vows that ask her to comfort your guilt by believing them.”
I looked down at my empty hand.
“She asked if she was alone,” I said.
“And what did you tell her?”
“That she was not.”
“Then make the words true, quietly.”
Quietly. The simplest commands were often the most difficult.
“I do not know how to hold this,” I admitted.
The confession entered the room like blood in water. My father did not seize upon it. He did not correct the vulnerability or tell me I was a king and should already know the shape of all burdens. He let the sentence exist.
“No,” he said at last. “You do not. No man does when it first happens.”
His voice softened by a degree that would have been invisible to anyone who had not spent centuries learning the makeup of his restraint.