7. Chapter 7
Grace
The bedchamber should have been nearly pitch-black. Heavy curtains sealed the early evening outside. No lamp burned. The fire had gone to ash in the hearth, leaving only a faint red memory buried under gray.
Still, I saw everything.
Not vaguely. Not the way human eyes adjusted after a few minutes and made hopeful shapes out of shadows.
I saw the gold thread running through the drapes where some patient hand had embroidered vines into the fabric.
I saw the grain of the armoire across the room, the slight warp near one carved foot where wood had once swollen with damp and been repaired.
I saw the fine seam in the ceiling where old stone met newer work.
I saw dust gathered along the edge of a frame on the wall, each mote distinct and offensive in its clarity.
My first thought was not wonder. It was evidence.
Something had been done to my eyes. To the mechanism of light. To the law by which darkness had always meant not seeing. I looked down and realized my robe had loosened in sleep.
The lapels had fallen open enough to expose the slope of my shoulder, the pale line of collarbone, the upper curve of a breast that had been bitten often enough I had learned not to think of it as mine. I pulled the robe shut with both hands so quickly the fabric whispered against my skin.
Then I froze. My skin.
I stared at my own chest where the robe gaped between my fists.
The bruises that had covered me the night before—purple, black, yellow, swollen proof of hands and mouths and punishment—had faded into faint discolorations, as if they belonged to someone whose injuries had been weeks old, not hours.
The lacerations along my ribs had closed.
The torn places around my wrists had become thin pale lines.
Bite marks that should have remained red and ugly had softened to silver-pink shadows against skin that looked almost luminous in the dark.
Almost pretty. The thought made me want to crawl out of my own body.
My body was erasing the record faster than my mind could bear to review it. By tomorrow, would there be anything left to prove what had happened? Anything other than memory, and memory had always been the first witness powerful men tried to discredit.
My hand went to my throat. The worst bite was gone.
Not gone. Changed. A faint tenderness remained beneath my fingertips, a place where Maksym’s mouth had been, and Lucian’s had been before him, and others before that. All of them collapsed into one unbearable geography. I swallowed.
My throat burned. That was when I remembered I was not alone. I turned my head. Maksym slept beside me.
He had not moved toward me in sleep. That was the first thing I noticed, because my body noticed everything.
He lay on his back at a slight angle, his head turned toward me, black hair loose against the pillow.
His body was close enough that I could feel the old cold-mountain scent of him in the sheets, but his hands were nowhere near me.
One rested on his own abdomen. The other lay open on the mattress at his side, palm up, fingers relaxed.
Not touching. Exactly as he had promised. The fact should not have mattered. It did.
He looked different asleep. Not harmless.
Men like him did not become harmless because their eyes closed.
Even at rest there was too much strength in the length of him, too much control built into the bones.
But the severe line of his mouth had softened, and exhaustion had left faint shadows beneath his eyes.
My attention moved to the nightstand. There was a full glass of blood wine waiting there. The glass had been placed within easy reach. Near enough that if I woke desperate, I would not need to search. Far enough that I still had to choose.
The hunger saw it before I did. It rose through me with a brutal, bodily certainty.
Not the hunger of two years of starvation, though that memory stirred beneath it like an old dog lifting its head.
This was sharper. Cleaner. It burned through my throat and under my tongue, pulling at the center of my chest as if someone had set a hook behind my sternum and begun to draw me forward by inches.
Blood. My fingers tightened around the robe.
No.
I would not lunge. I would not scramble across silk like an animal. I would not prove every monstrous thing Lucian had ever said about appetite and power and the truth of what lived beneath civilized skin.
I reached for the glass deliberately. Measured. Slow. One hand braced on the mattress, the other extending with the care of a woman disarming an explosive device. My fingers closed around it. Crystal. Cool. Fragile. I lifted it without spilling a drop.
Then I brought it to my lips. The first taste hit my tongue, and the burn in my throat loosened like a fist opening.
I inhaled sharply through my nose. The scent flooded me—iron, dark fruit, old wine, something faintly herbal beneath it. My gums ached. My mouth changed. I felt pressure beneath my canine teeth, deep and strange, as if bones had remembered a shape they had never had before.
I drank again. Deeper. The blood wine slid down my throat, and my body accepted it with humiliating gratitude. Heat moved outward from my chest. The trembling in my hands eased. The hollow, clawing place inside me quieted by a fraction, then demanded more because a fraction was an insult.
I tilted the glass higher.
“Slow down, Grace, or you’ll make yourself sick.”
Maksym’s voice entered the darkness without warning. I jerked so hard wine kissed the rim of the glass and nearly spilled over my hand. He had not moved.
His eyes were open now, amber even in the dark, fixed on me with a calm that felt obscene. Not sleepy. Not startled. Awake in the way predators must have always been awake, even after rest: instantly present, instantly aware.
My fingers tightened around the glass.
“I didn’t know you were awake,” I said.
“I woke when your breathing changed.”
Of course, my breathing had become public record.
I set the glass against my thigh, still holding it. “That’s unsettling.”
“Yes,” he said. “I imagine it is.”
His gaze lowered briefly to the glass and came back to my face. “This is likely the first true hunger you have felt since the transition settled into your body. It can feel violent. Your body is not betraying you. It is demanding what it needs.”
That calm, knowing tone cracked something open.
My jaw tightened so sharply my teeth hurt.
My free hand curled into a fist against the mattress, nails biting into my palm.
He knew. He knew the name of this. He knew the mechanism.
He knew why my throat burned, and why the blood wine had felt like relief, and why I wanted to drink until the glass was empty, and maybe then shatter it, because needing anything this badly felt like being owned.
He knew more about my body than I did. Again.
It wasn’t fair. None of this was. Everything that I had been had been taken from me by creatures like him.
Vampires. Monsters who drank from wrists and throats and called appetite biology when they had the luxury of names.
And he knew everything, and I knew nothing.
The glass trembled in my hand. Maksym saw. He did not reach. That made me angrier. I set the glass down. Or meant to.
It struck the nightstand with a sharp crack. Not the glass—the wood. A pale fracture split the polished surface beneath my hand, running crookedly through the dark finish.
I stared at it. Then rage took the rest of me. I shoved to my feet.
“You don’t know everything that you think you know!” I was shouting now—pacing.
“My safety was stripped. My autonomy! My career! My cases!”
I pulled at the robe I wore.
“My apartment, ugly as it had been, I’m sure was emptied. My grandmother’s name on old documents tucked in a drawer somewhere in Phoenix. My ability to walk into a courthouse with a badge clipped to my suit and make dangerous men sit down when I stood to speak.”
My voice had become ragged.
“My choices. My humanity. Every familiar law of flesh and light and hunger. All of it.”
The room moved too quickly. The hunger still burned, dulled, but not gone. My body felt wrong in its readiness. Too light. Too powerful. Like someone had replaced my bones with coiled wire and neglected to include instructions.
“I didn’t ask for this,” I said.
Maksym sat up slowly.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t!” My voice rose. “You keep saying that like knowing is the same as understanding. You don’t understand what it is to wake up and find out your own body has joined the prosecution against you.”
His expression changed at that. I did not care. I turned because I needed to put my hands on something that could bear the weight of what I could not say.
The armoire stood against the wall, carved oak, enormous, old enough to have opinions about the people who touched it.
I gripped the edge with both hands. I meant to shake it.
Maybe shove it. Maybe hurt my palms against something solid and inanimate because I could not hurt the dead years behind me, and I did not want to hurt the man on the bed.
The armoire lifted off the floor. Not an inch. Not a tremble. It came up.
The whole massive piece rose in my hands as if it had been made of painted cardboard. Its feet left the rug. Something inside slid and thumped against a door. Three hundred pounds of carved oak hung from my hands while my arms barely strained.
I stopped. Maksym stood. Not fast. Not with the blur I had seen vampires use when they wanted to frighten. He rose from the bed carefully, hands visible at his sides.
My grip tightened on the armoire. A door creaked.
“I could throw it,” I whispered.
“Yes,” he said.
I turned my head toward him. He was not looking at the armoire as if it mattered. He was looking at me. And there it was—the thing that stopped me.