13. Chapter 13 #2
He moved with deliberate economy, each step purposeful, nothing wasted.
His long black hair fell past his shoulders, satin-dark except for the faint gray at his temples, which had nothing to do with age and everything to do with his refusal to appear less burdened than he was.
His tailored suit was charcoal so deep it was nearly black; the jacket open.
Faint ancient scars crossed the pale skin there, thin lines like ghost-script written by blades that should have known better than to touch him.
His face was all carved angles: high cheekbones, straight nose, mouth made for command more than comfort. His pale blue eyes found me first, assessed, approved in the space of a heartbeat, and moved to Grace.
She nearly stumbled.
I felt the shift in her weight before she could hide it. My hand lifted without permission. She caught herself at once, shoulders straightening, chin rising in a way that made my chest ache with admiration.
My father saw everything. He pretended not to see that.
“Welcome home, my son,” Kazimir said.
I inclined my head. “Father.”
Then he turned fully to Grace.
“Gracelyn Marlow,” he said, with a warmth so carefully measured it could not be mistaken for manipulation. “It is my honor to receive you in my home.”
Grace looked at him as if every story I had told her had failed by not being impossible enough.
“Thank you,” she said. Her voice held steady. “Your Majesty.”
My father’s mouth softened.
“Here, Kazimir will do, if you can bear the informality.” His accent wrapped the words in old winter. “Titles multiply in this family if one allows them unchecked.”
Grace blinked once, then said, “I’ll do my best, but I reserve the right to panic politely.”
“A sensible reservation.”
I stared at him. He glanced behind me.
“Taras.”
“Father.”
“I trust you’ve kept things on an even keel?”
“As even as the keel may be kept, sir.”
My father’s gaze flicked briefly to mine. Dry humor moved there and vanished before witnesses could accuse him of being approachable.
“My wife is still in the training yard,” he continued, turning slightly as if to draw us farther into the house. “She insisted she had time to finish before you arrived, which meant she did not.”
Before anyone could answer, a voice rang from somewhere deeper in the estate.
“Come on, Axiom, shit! I think they’re here!”
The words bounded into the foyer with the lyrical brightness of a hymn that had learned profanity and found it useful.
Grace went very still. My father closed his eyes for half a second. I did not smile. I was almost certain I had not. Devon rounded the corner at speed.
She wore gold-and-white battle leathers fitted for movement rather than display, the pale armor catching lantern-light along reinforced seams and buckles.
A sword rested at her hip. Her white-blonde hair had been pulled into a high ponytail but was escaping in unruly waves around her face and neck, as if even leather ties understood they were temporary suggestions.
Her skin carried that faint luminescence no human foundation could imitate, not glowing exactly, but lit from some place beneath blood.
In one hand, she held the remains of a frosted cinnamon roll. The other hand was extended behind her, fingers sticky with white icing and held dangerously close to the massive hellhound padding after her.
Axiom emerged from the corridor with the casual horror of a nightmare that had decided to become a house pet.
He was enormous, shoulder nearly to Devon’s ribs, black as furnace soot with muscle moving beneath his hide like coiled rope.
His eyes burned ember-red. His mouth was too large, too full of teeth, and currently dripping frosting in long, obscene strings over his lower jaw.
Smoke curled faintly from his nostrils. Claws clicked against the stone floor with each step.
Grace stared. Axiom’s tongue swiped the side of his muzzle, collecting icing from one row of teeth.
Devon stopped in the center of the foyer, apparently registering all of us at once.
“Oh,” she said. “Good. We made it.”
She looked down at the cinnamon roll in her hand. Then left. Then right. As if the grand foyer might discreetly provide a small pastry altar.
My father stepped toward her.
“Here, my darling.”
His voice changed for her. Not dramatically. Kazimir did not perform tenderness. He allowed it to exist, which was far more dangerous to those of us who knew him.
He took her sticky wrist gently, relieved her of the pastry with his other hand, and passed it backward without looking.
Tilden had already appeared with a small silver plate. Of course he had. The pastry landed upon it with dignity it had not earned.
Tilden also produced a damp cloth from somewhere within the laws of household sorcery and offered it to my father.
Kazimir cleaned Devon’s fingers with the attention of a monarch sealing a treaty.
Each sticky digit, the heel of her palm, the delicate line between thumb and forefinger.
Devon watched him with an expression that was half amusement, half adoration, and entirely hers.
“There was a frosting emergency,” she said.
“So I see.”
“Axiom was starving.”
Axiom’s mouth dripped icing onto the stone.
“He appears near death,” my father said.
Devon’s lips twitched. A bit of frosting remained at the corner of her mouth. My father saw it. He handed the cloth back to Tilden, cupped Devon’s chin with two fingers, and kissed the frosting from her lips. Quietly. Deliberately. Not indecent. More intimate than indecency could ever manage.
Grace’s breath shifted beside me. I did not look at her. I could not. There were moments in a family when witnesses either belonged enough to see or did not belong and should look away. Grace stood between those categories, and I felt the crossing like a door opening.
My father lifted his head.
“That’s better,” he said.
Devon’s eyes had softened to storm-lit turquoise. Then she seemed to remember us.
“Oh! Hello.” She stepped away from Kazimir, though his hand remained lightly on her back. “You must be Grace.”
My father turned with courtly calm, as if his wife had not arrived armed, swearing, frosting-covered, and accompanied by a hellhound with dessert on his fangs.
“Grace,” he said, “this is my wife, Devon Wade Kozlov.”
Grace did not answer immediately. She was looking at Devon.
I had seen humans look at beauty before. I had watched patrons stare at vampires, demons, witches drunk on their own power. This was not that. Grace looked as if something in her recognized the outline of holiness and did not know whether to trust its survival in a room full of monsters.
Devon’s understanding eyes met hers, and she smiled softly.
“Don’t mind Axiom,” she said. “He looks terrible, but he has very strong feelings about pastries and very poor manners.”
Axiom huffed smoke.
Then Grace did something no intelligence briefing, no mate bond, no centuries of strategic thought could have prepared me for.
She bent down to him.
“Grace,” I said, already moving.
But she had placed one hand palm-up and had fixed her entire attention on the hellhound.
“Well, look at you,” she cooed, in a voice I had never heard from her and would have once sworn impossible. “Aren’t you just the most beautiful boy? Yes, you are. You are a terrifying baby with frosting on your murder face.”
The foyer became silent. Utterly silent.
Even Tilden’s expression altered, which in another century would have signaled an approaching political collapse.
Grace leaned slightly forward, her hand still open, fingers relaxed.
“Aren’t you handsome? Such a good boy. Such a big, scary sweetheart. Did somebody give you a cinnamon roll? Did they? Was that your snack? I bet it was. I bet you deserved it.”
Axiom lowered his enormous head toward her hand. Every instinct I possessed detonated. I stepped forward to pull her back. My father’s hand closed around my arm. Firm. Absolute. A stay of execution delivered through fingers that had held empires still.
I looked at him. His pale eyes did not leave the hellhound. He mouthed the word, “Wait.”
Axiom’s nose hovered above Grace’s palm. It was the size of a dinner plate, black and wet and smoking faintly at the nostrils. His teeth could have closed around her wrist and removed it before even I could cross the distance.
Grace did not tremble.
The bond did. It pulled at me with such violence that my fangs pressed down before I forced them back. Mine, some ancient animal part of me snarled. Mine to guard. Mine to shield. Mine to carry away from teeth and fire and every risk she did not understand.
But she did understand risk. That was the problem.
Grace knew exactly what monsters could do. She had crawled from one. And still she held out her hand to another because Devon had told her not to mind him, and perhaps Grace had decided she would choose for herself which beasts deserved fear.
Axiom sniffed her palm. Then he pushed his enormous head beneath her hand. Grace’s face changed.
“Oh,” she whispered.
Her fingers settled between his ears. The hellhound’s eyes half-closed.
Devon laughed once, delighted and disbelieving. “Well. That’s new.”
Grace scratched Axiom’s head with solemn attention. “He’s a baby.”
“He is a hellhound,” I said.
“He is a baby hellhound.”
“He is not a baby.”
Axiom leaned harder into her hand, nearly overbalancing her.
Grace made a soft sound and braced her other hand against his massive jaw. “See? Baby.”
My father released my arm. Slowly.
I did not move closer. I did not trust myself not to embarrass every crown in our bloodline by hauling my mate away from a creature currently behaving better than several princes I knew.
Devon crossed to Grace.
Not quickly. Not with the careless cheer she had entered with. Something in her altered as she approached, the air around her faintly shimmering, the gold-and-white leathers suddenly less costume than relic. She crouched beside Grace and touched her shoulder.
Grace did not flinch. That mattered so much the foyer seemed to notice.