Chapter 22 #2
Despite the discomfort straightening his spine, he didn’t move toward the door.
Instead, he tossed the coat I’d used over a lounge near the small fireplace.
He moved on to his shirt, opening it around the collar down to his sternum, stopping there.
His belt went next, the buckle hitting the hardwood with a loud crack.
“Do you need help?” he asked, watching me struggle with the corset ties behind my back.
I nodded, facing away from him to steady myself on the bed frame. His fingers were nimble, loosening the bodice until it fell away from my chest. Face burning, I grabbed it before it fell off my chest completely.
“You can borrow a shirt from the drawer,” he said quietly.
When I opened the dresser, I found it full, despite the room’s unused appearance. Still holding the bodice to my chest, I asked him, “Is this your room? Why didn’t you say so?”
He shrugged. “You already made yourself at home.” Beckoning to a screen beyond the bed, he said. “Go on. Unless you’d rather sleep in my bed in nothing at all.”
He had some nerve speaking to me like that. Especially after I caught him heading off with one of Ronny’s girls. The memory was still a fresh burn in my heart. “You’re not that lucky, Maxence.”
He said nothing as I slipped behind the screen and changed into his shirt—a soft black material that hung to my knees. The rustle of fabric was too loud in the quiet tension. “I suppose I should say I’m sorry, though, for ruining your evening.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
I tossed the dress on a bench at the end of the bed. Max’s warm gaze widened slightly as I appeared, his lips parting. It pleased me, the way he appeared almost hungry. “Your plans for the night, before you found me. She was beautiful.”
He leaned against the mantel, wiping a hand over his face. “Nina, it wasn’t what it looked like, I promise. I didn’t touch her. We didn’t even make it to her room.”
I shrugged, pretending to be apathetic. “It’s no concern of mine.”
“Are you sure?” I could hear the grin in his voice.
“Positive.”
“So seeing me with Isobel had nothing to do with you leaving in such a rush tonight?”
I looked him dead in the eye. “Why would it?”
He moved closer, strides eating the space between us, until he was across the bed. “Isobel is kind. She’s looked out for me when others were cruel. She doesn’t judge me when I tell her things, for what I am, or what I’ve done. She knows the truth about me and doesn’t flinch away.”
I huffed a breath. “That’s quite enough, Maxence.”
“But we are friends. Nothing more. I feel nothing for her,” he said, a sense of urgency appearing in his voice.
“Nina, I went up there thinking my life would go back the way it was if I just slipped into my old habits. That playing a card game with Isobel like we used to could help me forget you for a blessed moment, maybe distract from this thorn in my chest you’ve made with the company of another.
Hell, I didn’t even make it to the top step before I realized how foolish it was. ”
I squinted my eyes. “You expect me to believe you scheduled time with a lovely courtesan to gamble? Do you think I’m an idiot?”
He took a step closer, cracking my hardened resolve. “Then I admit, yes, I might have coincidentally hired her at a time when I knew you’d be around.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I panicked,” he blurted too quickly.
Max sighed. “You have a power over me, Nina. One that turns me into something I don’t recognize.
It’s the way you transfix me, how you pulled me out of a rage.
It is terrifying. Even after I made myself leave you on the stairs, every instinct demanded I run back down to find you again.
I fought it until I couldn’t, and by then, you were already gone. ”
Some of the ice in my heart thawed, picturing him descending those stairs into the lobby, searching for me, and realizing I was gone. He held up the Vitalis die between his fingers, the last die he had left. “When I couldn’t find you, when your heartbeat was too far to find, I hunted you down.”
I climbed on top of the bed and sat on my knees. He’d been worried then, not angry. Sometimes the two presented the same. “Will you tell me about how you got your dice?”
He shifted on his feet, pocketing the artifact. “I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” He scowled, pacing to the other side of the small room in three steps. “Because you were right before. I’m afraid you will look at me differently when you know the truth, and I prefer how you regard me now.” He turned to glare at me, like it was my fault.
I couldn’t help the smile that touched my cheeks. “You tried to kill me, literally shot at me, and I got over that. There’s nothing in your past that would change the way I look at you.”
Max sighed, considering a thought in silence. He finally said, “It’s not a happy story, Ace.”
I crawled to the head of the double bed, patting the pillow beside me in a silent invitation. His lips pinched, like he was trying to resist the urge to join me, but ultimately, he lost the battle. He sat on top of the black sheets and kicked off his boots.
“Fuck it. What do you want to know?”
I rested on a pillow, lying on my side as his gaze slid over my hips. “Ell said you went through something they didn’t. Damien called you favored. What happened during the Trials? Who is the Father who did this to you?”
Max sat against the iron headboard. “The Trials were top secret, even among the other engineers at the Academy. The lead researcher was studying bloodlines of Archetypes and their biological markers, how they are passed down through generations, how certain bloodlines are more dominant than others when people reproduce. He was fascinated by the nature of magic and how it exposes itself through inherited traits. To learn more about this, he needed to study bloodlines. He needed breeders.”
Breeders. The look on my face must have betrayed my disgust at the word, because Max shut his eyes, not looking at me as he explained further.
“I don’t know how he did it, but he was able to find women to participate in his trials.
He said he’d compensate them somehow, whatever they wanted, as long as they bred under his careful guidance.
At some point, after decades of quiet research, he was able to create two children who were descendants of every bloodline. ”
“You were one of them?”
He nodded. “His greatest creations, he called us. The rest of the world just called us what we were. Abominations.”
“You have every bloodline from every Archetype?” I asked.
He nodded. “It’s no different than a child having blue eyes when the parents have brown.
He discovered that even if the bloodline wasn’t expressed, the others were still dormant somewhere inside the child.
The problem was, just because they had the bloodline didn’t mean they had the ability to use it.
When someone develops an Archetype, magic gathers in a specific part of the body.
It’s different for each one. Bones for Forge, brain matter for Glamour…
Since we were descendants of every Archetype, we could accept any part from any bloodline. ”
My mouth fell open in shock, thinking about the mangled scars covering his back. “Do you mean, he took out your healthy bones and organs and transplanted them with someone else’s?”
Max didn’t look at me, staring at the rafters in the ceiling.
“He brought in other children our age. People like Andre and Elli. He wanted to create something that had never been done before. But one of the children wasn’t able to accept the transplants, and he eventually became too sick to continue. ”
“Let me guess,” I interrupted. “This other child, the one who failed, was Damien.”
Max nodded. “For some reason, he’s jealous that I was mutilated even more than him.”
“He envies you?” I shook my head. “What an idiot.”
“Not necessarily. We were raised to believe the lead engineer was our savior, a father to us, and Damien lived to please him. Unfortunately, I quickly became the favorite because I could take anything. But even after they stuffed me with foreign parts, I still couldn’t wield the implanted magic. Not until he figured out the problem.”
He plucked the die from my possession, pinching it in the light.
“Because it was an artificial gift, the bloodlines, I had no access to essence. So he Cursed me. He made me drink from the other engineers at the Academy to transform me. Which was highly inconvenient, seeing as I had to drink from specific Archetypes to use certain bloodlines. As soon as I got out afterward, Andre helped me create the dice, so I didn’t have to feed anymore. ”
“I don’t understand, though. Why didn’t he just write the code in you himself?” I asked. “Isn’t that what they usually do for Academy graduates?”
Max paused for a moment, flinching as he recalled the memory. “He tried. Something about nature doesn’t allow for more than one Archetype to exist in someone’s genetic coding at a time. What he did… it went against the laws of humanity. I shouldn’t even exist, Nina.”
“So how did you ever get out?”
“Your father,” he said quietly.
I sat up on my elbows. “What about my father?”
Max rubbed his eyes, stalling for a moment longer.
“Lucien Veyr was on the engineering team that oversaw all the experiments in the Anatomical Wing. He enjoyed studying us, our anatomy and such. He truly had a passion for understanding how magic was passed down. But once the other engineer, the Father, began to cut us open and manipulate biology, he refused to participate any further in the Trials. Lucien tried to stop him, called the experimentation unethical and amoral, and threatened to expose his work to the Magister. But when no one helped him, he took matters into his own hands. Eventually, after my last surgery, he promised to get us all out.”