8. Chapter 8
Maksym
The dual monitors on my desk cast a cool, bluish glow across the polished surface and over the paperwork Taras had sent to me. We had satellite images of Phoenix properties, copies of corporate filings that showed legitimacy as though no crimes held the entire enterprise together.
Taras sat at the conference table ten feet away, his own laptop open, a handwritten notebook placed squarely beside it.
He still preferred paper when building the bones of an investigation.
Ink, he claimed, remembered the shape of thought better than a screen.
His pen moved quickly, the faint scratch of it precise and steady, pausing only when he cross-referenced something on his screen.
“Devereux Holdings LLC owns the Phoenix office tower outright,” Taras said without looking up. “Purchased nineteen years ago through three intermediaries. Clean on paper. Too clean.”
“Clean usually means washed,” I said.
His pen moved. “Exactly.”
On my center monitor, Lucian Devereux smiled at me from a charity gala photograph, blond hair tied at the nape of his neck, one hand resting lightly around a wineglass, the other touching the elbow of a judge whose name I recognized from human legal circles.
I dragged the image aside and opened the next file.
“Known Phoenix holdings,” I said. “Commercial real estate, a private investment firm, finance and stock trading operations, two residential compounds, one vineyard he does not drink from, one art storage facility, three warehouses, and enough charitable boards to make him look philanthropic to fools.”
“Fools are his preferred demographic,” Taras chuffed.
“He sits on Father’s Elder Council. Fools are not his only audience.”
“Elder status provides cover. No one asks the proper questions when rank has already supplied the answer.”
I leaned back in my chair and looked again at the photograph. Lucian’s image stared back with all the calm entitlement of a creature who believed law was an inconvenience endured by lesser bloodlines.
“He brought her to Vegas,” I said quietly. “That was arrogance.”
“That was habit,” Taras replied. “Arrogance is usually only habit that has gone unpunished.”
My mouth tightened.
We had built the first layer of the board in less than an hour.
Lucian’s known human-world fronts. Elder Council connections.
Social allies. Vampire houses that visited his estates.
Donor registries that might have been falsified.
Security firms that appeared human but carried the signatures of supernatural influence.
Accountants. Attorneys. Property managers.
Men and women who might know nothing. Men and women who might know enough to hang.
Taras had already marked several names with a thin black line in his notebook. Not suspects yet. Questions. Questions were safer than rage. Questions kept the blade in the sheath until it knew where to enter.
“Nikolay will have records on Council attendance,” Taras said. “Father can have him start pulling info.”
“Not yet.”
“No.” He glanced up. “Not yet.”
We both understood the shape of that restraint.
Once Kazimir moved through formal channels, every Elder with something to hide would feel the air change.
Men like Lucian survived by sensing weather before common creatures looked up at the sky.
We needed him comfortable. We needed him vain.
We needed him convinced that Grace had disappeared into the desert or died in some gutter before reaching anyone who mattered.
My fingers tightened once on the arm of my chair. Grace.
The bond answered before thought finished forming her name. But I had to put the need aside. I needed to make a call.
“I need to get Remy here and up to speed before Grace has a chance to meet her.”
Remington Duval was my right hand. Next to Taras I trusted her more than anyone. A witch with superior ability, she’d been by my side for decades. I wanted her by Grace’s side as well.
“Her reaction to hearing you have found your mate should be interesting.”
“Quite.”
I made the call, and within minutes, the dark-skinned beauty from New Orleans arrived.
Remy leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed over her tailored jacket. Her dark eyes swept the room—Taras’s meticulous notes, the glowing screens, Lucian’s smirking photograph—before settling on me. That familiar blend of loyalty and skepticism sharpened her gaze.
“Majesty,” she drawled, the New Orleans cadence softening the formality. “You said it was urgent. Smells like war in here.” Her nostrils flared slightly, probably catching the lingering scent of Grace from my sleeve. Her eyebrow arched. “And something else. Something... new.”
I didn’t flinch. Remy missed nothing. I gestured her toward the conference table. “Sit. We have a viper in the garden. It involves Elder Lucian Devereux and blood slavery.”
Her posture shifted instantly; the casual lean replaced by coiled readiness. She pulled out a chair opposite Taras; her gaze sharpening. “Blood slavery.” It wasn’t a question. The scent of ozone, faint but unmistakable, whispered around her—her magic reacting to the ugliness named.
“Confirmed,” I said, tapping the monitor displaying Devereux’s gala smile.
“He held a woman captive for two years. Starved her. Used her. Her name is Grace. She’s upstairs with Millie.”
Remy’s eyebrow arched, a silent demand for context. I gave it to her, stripped bare: the blood slave Lucian had used and who had somehow escaped and made her way outside Amethyst.
“She is also my mate.”
Her dark eyes locked onto mine, not with surprise—Remy Duval didn’t do surprise—but with a sudden, blade-sharp reassessment. She leaned back slowly in her chair; the leather creaking under her weight.
“Your mate,” she repeated, the words deliberate, tasting them like unfamiliar wine. “Lucian Devereaux’s blood slave is your mate.”
Taras didn’t look up from his laptop, but I felt the shift in him—a tightening of focus, like a predator scenting weakness in the hunt. His pen still scratched across paper, but slower now, waiting.
“Yes,” I said, the word scraping raw in my throat. I didn’t soften it. Didn’t dress it in royal detachment. The bond thrummed beneath my ribs, a live wire humming toward the room above us where Grace stood under Millie’s care. “She collapsed outside Amethyst. Dying. I turned her.”
She nodded slowly.
“Check your email, Highness, and you’ll find that our boy Lucian stopped by Amethyst just last night and asked Shad for an audience with you. I can only assume it must have something to do with his missing slave.”
I grabbed my phone and immediately called my operations manager. His voice filled the room from the speaker.
“Good evening, Your Majesty.”
I did not waste time on formalities.
“Shad. I understand Lucian Devereaux is asking for an audience?”
“Yes, sir. Quite insistent, in fact. He came in with a few men last night and all but demanded to speak with the king. I, of course, told him he could make an appointment like everyone else. But that I’d pass the message. I included his contact info in the email.”
“Call him, tell him I have a fifteen-minute window now. I’ll meet him in the club conference room, not at the palace.”
“Right away, sir.”
I hung up the phone and headed for the door with Remy and Taras on my heels.
I needed to know what that fucker knew about Grace’s whereabouts.
On the short drive to Amethyst, I discussed the chances of Lucian’s witches scrying for Grace’s location.
She felt that once my blood entered her system, tracking her would become nearly impossible.
“I want you setting anti-scrying barriers around the palace and Amethyst. And Remy, while I’m talking to Lucian, I want him to tell me the truth, whether or not he knows her location.
Nothing else. We’re trying to set a trap for him.
I don’t want him to be tipped off to the fact that Grace is with me. ”
“Done.”
Shad showed Lucian in at precisely the time I had allotted him.
The conference room at Amethyst was not designed to comfort visitors.
Dark paneled walls absorbed the light from iron sconces.
The carved table ran long and black down the center, eight high-backed chairs arranged with the kind of precision that reminded men they had been expected.
Relics and rare weapons lined the credenzas—not decorative, simply present.
I sat at the head. Taras to my left, still as a blade laid flat.
Remy to my right, dark-eyed and unhurried.
Lucian’s gaze moved across the three of us and did not find anywhere safe to land.
He sat and placed his folded hands on the table.
“What brings you to Las Vegas, Mr. Devereaux, and why does it concern your king?”
He cleared his throat. “I had a few business matters to attend to. But, I’m afraid, in the process a small issue has arisen that I feel I must report.”
When I said nothing in reply, he continued.
“It seems the blood donor I travel with decided to leave me without being officially released.”
“Let me see if I understand this correctly. Your contracted human blood donor... decided they no longer wanted to be such and just... left. I’m at a loss for how that’s even possible. Those contracts are held through blood magic. Remy, help me here. It’s been a while since I read a donor contract.”
“Yes, Majesty. A blood magic contract is drawn between the vampire and the human donor by mutual agreement. It has an expiration date or can be broken, but there is due process for that to happen.”
“So, Lucian. Did you and your donor go through this due process?”
“Well, no, Majesty. We didn’t end the contract.
And that’s why I am so worried. My um...
donor was temperamental, see, and tended to throw little tantrums. I’m afraid she was angry with me and might have run away to seek an audience with you or one of your representatives, or even possibly run outside the kingdom. ”