16. Chapter 16 #4
He came in with the same contained precision he carried everywhere, silver hair neat, dark suit unwrinkled despite travel and club operations and whatever burdens came from being the man everyone trusted to make disaster look scheduled.
His eyes found Maksym first. A silent exchange passed between them—brief, efficient, unreadable to me beyond the fact that it contained too much information for one glance.
Then Taras moved to me. Not to Maksym. To me.
He stopped a respectful distance away and dipped his head in a precise, unhurried bow.
“My lady.”
The title struck differently from him. I set my glass down before I could fidget with it.
“Taras,” I said. “If I say Grace, will you pretend to consider it?”
His eyes warmed by half a degree. “I will genuinely consider it and then behave according to the needs of the room.”
“That is a very elegant no.”
“It is perhaps a conditional no.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You and Tilden are conspiring.”
“Tilden does not conspire,” Taras said. “He arranges inevitabilities.”
Devon pointed a piece of cheese at him. “That is exactly what conspiring is when you do it with napkins.”
Before Taras could answer, the doorway filled again.
Nikolay entered first, and even prepared as I was, he was a lot of man to have arrive in a sitting room already populated by royalty, trauma, and dairy products.
He was broad-shouldered and tall, with an open, expressive face that softened what should have been an intimidating frame.
His amber eyes were warm in a way Maksym’s were not by default.
Laugh lines bracketed his eyes and mouth even at rest, as if humor had lived there long enough to leave permanent evidence.
Yet there was power in him, too. Enormous, old, restrained.
He carried himself like a man who could make peace because everyone in the room understood what would happen if peace declined the invitation.
Beside him came Maddie.
And Maddie was exactly what she had appeared to be from the VIP level below Obsidian: small, curvy, alive with energy, and dressed as if leather and lace had entered a legally binding partnership.
Chestnut hair fell in thick waves around her shoulders.
Her whiskey-colored eyes moved over the room, took in everyone, and landed on me with immediate brightness.
Nikolay stepped forward first and gave a somewhat formal bow.
“My lady. I am Nikolay,” he said, his deep voice measured and warm. “And this is my mate, Madelyn.”
“Maddie,” she corrected before he had finished the final syllable.
His mouth tightened in a way that suggested this was not the first time.
“Maddie,” he amended.
She stepped around him as if no vampire prince in existence could block a Texas woman with a destination.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” she said, her drawl quick and warm and edged with mischief. “I understand you’re the one who’s going to be able to save his ass.”
For one suspended second, no one moved.
Then my jaw relaxed.
All the tension I had been carrying—Lucian, the drive, the estate, Lucia’s questions, Ryder’s story, my own terrible arithmetic about good and evil—shifted inside me and found an exit.
My mouth curved. The first real laugh of the evening rose in my throat before pain could stop it. It came out bright, startled, and entirely mine.
Maksym turned his head toward me. I felt his attention settle there, quiet and fierce. But for once, I did not look to him to find out whether I was safe.
I looked at Maddie, who grinned like she had just walked into a royal sitting room and committed a public service.
“Well,” I said, still laughing softly, “I do have relevant experience with difficult men and impossible cases.”
Maddie’s eyes lit.
Nikolay sighed as if fate had once again arrived wearing spiked heels.
Then the air in the room had gone still at the arrival of Kazimir. He didn’t glide past me and Maksym on his way to his wife. He stopped and held his hand out to me. Unsure of the protocol, I gently placed my right hand in his. He covered it with his other hand.
“I trust my family has made you feel welcome?”
“Very much so, sir.”
“Lovely. More than anything, Grace, we want you to know that the Kozlovs stand with you. You do not fight alone, my dear.”
It had been so long since I had any kind of family. My grandmother had been dead for years, and I had been alone since. I simply nodded and fought the tears that tried to fall. He seemed to understand as he let go of my hand and settled into the chair behind where Devon sat on the floor.
I looked around the room at all of them.
The vampire king’s son beside me. His sister in black lace.
Her hybrid wolf doctor. A fallen angel eating cheese with her fingers, and her husband, the King of Kings admiring her as she did.
The shadow of a twin brother bowing with surgical precision.
A warm-eyed prince pretending not to orbit a Texas wolf who clearly intended to be a problem.
The voice of Bohdan, the charming youngest vampire prince, who held a crowd of monsters in a trance tonight filled the foyer as he strolled in.
Monsters, maybe. But not only monsters.
For the first time since Lucian’s name had returned to the room through a screen in Bohdan’s office, I felt the smallest, strangest possibility take root beneath my ribs.
There might be enough good ones after all.