10. Chapter 10 #2
“To sharpen it?”
He nodded once.
“Days.”
The fire popped softly.
“I used the tile floor,” I said. “Travertine. There was one rough place near the wall where a corner had chipped. I ground the end of the slat against it whenever I could. A little at a time. During the day, if the house was empty. At night, under the blanket. After feedings, when they thought I was too weak to move. It was slow. Stupidly slow.”
My fingers remembered the splinters.
“I tore my palms open twice,” I said. “I wrapped the blood in the sheet and slept on that side so they would think it came from somewhere else. The sound was the problem. Wood against stone. Scrape, pause. Scrape, pause. I learned to time it with the air conditioning kicking on. Plumbing. A car outside. The guard watching videos on his phone.”
Taras had stopped writing again.
His attention was on me wholly now, not as a note-taker, not as the kneeling brother who had vowed vengeance, but as a strategist appreciating a weapon built from nothing.
“The point was not elegant,” I said. “It wasn’t a stake from some movie. It was a jagged piece of bedframe with one end narrowed enough to enter flesh if I put enough force behind it.”
“You knew where to strike?” Remy asked.
“No,” I said. “I knew where not to miss.”
Something like approval flashed in her eyes.
“The guard came in after Lucian left. I heard him unlock the outer door. Heard him pause in the hallway. Heard the little laugh he made when he thought he was about to get away with something.” I swallowed. “I put the slat under the blanket beside my thigh.”
The room narrowed around the memory.
“He sat first,” I said. “He liked to pretend he was deciding. He told me Lucian would never know. He said I should be grateful because he would make it quick if I behaved. He said he had been patient.”
Maksym’s fangs were visible now. Only slightly. Enough.
I looked away from his mouth.
“He came onto the bed,” I said. “He grabbed my hair and turned my head. He wanted the throat. Of course he did. They always wanted the throat when they wanted you to know they could end you.”
My voice nearly changed. I forced it back into line.
“He bit.”
No one breathed.
“The bite hurt,” I said. “He did not use venom. They never did; I know that now. Pain went white behind my eyes. That helped. Pain can make the body stupid, but it can also make it simple. There was only one thing left to do.”
I lifted my hand and placed two fingers against my own neck, just at the jugular.
“I drove the spike into him here. I used as much force as I could. I didn’t know if his vein would rupture like mine or not. I didn’t know if vampires had some trick with organs. I didn’t care. I used both hands and everything left in me.”
The sound came back. Not his scream. Not first. The wet shock of wood entering flesh.
His mouth tore away from my throat. Blood went everywhere. Mine, his, I did not know. He made a sound I had never heard from a vampire before. Surprise. Not pain first. Surprise. Like the universe had insulted him by permitting me to act.
“I don’t know how badly I hurt him,” I said. “I didn’t stay to check. He fell off the bed. He grabbed at the wood. I kicked him in the face.”
Remy’s laugh this time was quiet and feral.
“I fell too,” I said. “My legs weren’t working properly. I hit the tile. I crawled to the door.”
The lock. God, the lock.
The slippery metal under bloody fingers. The impossible complexity of something simple. The certainty that he would rise behind me. That Lucian would appear. That the world would take back the one breach I had made in it.
“My hands were wet,” I said. “I couldn’t turn the lock at first. I kept wiping my fingers on the carpet, but there was no carpet. Tile everywhere. I finally used the sheet. Wrapped it around my hand. Turned the deadbolt. Then the knob. Then I was in the hallway.”
I looked down at the table.
“I expected more guards.”
“There were none?” Taras asked.
“None that I saw. Lucian’s arrogance saved me more than any mercy ever did.”
Maksym’s face had gone terrible again. I continued before anyone could make another vow to me.
“The front door had a keypad and a deadbolt. I knew the code because the guard was careless and because people think if you are chained, you are not listening. I had heard the tones. I had counted them. I guessed the sequence on the second try.”
Remy smiled slowly. “Of course you did.”
“I am very good at patterns,” I said.
“I am beginning to understand that.”
“I ran.”
That was not accurate. I had not run well. But run was the legal category. Movement with intent to escape.
“I was barefoot,” I said. “The pavement was still warm. There were rocks. Broken glass. Trash behind restaurants. Music from somewhere. Men laughing near a service entrance. A delivery truck idling. Neon reflecting in puddles that smelled like beer and old oil.”
My feet remembered before I looked at them. The soles had healed now. Of course they had. My body had erased even that.
“I stayed out of the main streets when I could,” I said. “Alleys. Service lanes. Behind hotels. I moved toward the Strip because I knew Amethyst was near it, but not on it. Lucian had mocked that, too. Said you wanted proximity to human vice without lowering yourself to tourist spectacle.”
“Accurate, in his own grotesque way,” Taras said.
Maksym did not react.
“I looked for the building he described with such contempt,” I said. “Rundown to humans. Something else to monsters. He said the wards made it forgettable unless you had the right blood or the right invitation. I did not have either.”
“You had me,” Maksym said softly.
The words entered the room and changed nothing visible, yet my skin reacted beneath the sleeves of my sea-foam dress.
I looked at him.
At the man I had been trying to reach without knowing his face. At the creature Lucian hated enough to make him useful. At the vampire king who had turned me into one of the things I feared and then knelt before my knees as if my survival deserved ceremony.
“There was nothing that would stop me from getting to the man that Lucian seemed to hate most in the world. The man now seated next to me. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and all. I didn’t know there was cosmic bullshit waiting for me.”
For one second, no one spoke.
Then Remy laughed again. Not at me. I would have known the difference. At the absurdity.
Taras lowered his head. His mouth had gone tight again, but this time not with rage.
Maksym stared at me. He looked at me as if I had crawled out of hell an avenging angel.
Remy’s laughter faded into a smile. She held Maksym’s gaze across the room, and all the mirth softened into something older, something that made the air around her seem charged.
“The Goddess chose well,” she said.
Maksym’s jaw tightened slightly. He did not look away from me.
I wanted to tell them the Goddess could have chosen a less theatrical delivery system.
But Maksym’s eyes held mine, and the words died before they reached my tongue.
“I have lost two years,” I said. “I am disinclined to waste additional time for atmosphere.”
Then, out of the blue, Maksym delivered words that took my breath.
“He knows you escaped.”
“How do you know this for certain?”
“Because before we started this meeting with you, we met with the man himself.”
I pushed away from the table. “And you waited until now to share this piece of information? What the hell, Maksym?”
He kneeled in front of me again.
“You needed to tell your story first. It was important that you remembered that you got away on your own and are the one standing.”
“Fine. Tell me. Why did he want to meet with you?”
He stood and leaned against the table.
“He needed to inform me that his blood donor had run away.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
“Remy had him spelled. He couldn’t lie about the fact that he had no idea where you were. He’s had witches scrying for your whereabouts. They traced you to near Amethyst, then they lost you.”
“He all but accused me of harboring you. Of course, I told him that was preposterous and that he needed to be very careful about accusing his king.”
“We learned that he’ll try to have an out using donor consent fraud,” Remy said. “He has likely prepared paperwork for every human he holds.”
“Of course he has,” I said. “Men like Lucian do not keep cages without also keeping documents that say the cages are voluntary.”
Maksym’s face hardened.
I turned toward him fully. “If I stay hidden, I am a secret. Secrets are useful in investigations until they become liabilities. I am already a liability because he knows I exist. What he does not know is whether I reached you alive, whether I can speak, whether I remember enough to hurt him, and whether you have claimed me in a way that raises the cost of touching me.”
Maksym’s gaze sharpened. “Claimed.”
I sighed. “Do not get distracted by vocabulary.”
“I am focused.”
“You are absolutely not focused. Your mate bond has opinions about the word claimed, and I can feel them from here.”
Remy put a hand over her mouth.
Taras turned slightly toward the fire, which fooled no one.
Maksym stared at me for a long second. Then something dry moved through his expression and vanished. “Continue.”
I pointed at him. “That. Do that. Less brooding. More listening.”
Remy lost the battle and laughed under her breath.
“Grace,” Maksym said, voice low.
I felt the warning in it. Not anger. Something closer to the strain of a man whose self-control was being asked to perform in public while the universe kicked it in the ribs.
“If I appear publicly,” I said, “under Kozlov protection, preferably in a setting where Lucian’s peers and enemies are forced to observe the fact of me, then he has a different problem.
He cannot quietly retrieve me. He cannot accuse you of kidnapping me without inviting inquiry into why he had me.
He cannot move openly without challenging the Western Crown, your father’s law, and whatever political equilibrium keeps monsters from eating one another in the streets. ”
Remy nodded slowly. “She is right.”