3. Chapter 3 #3
That was the problem with truth. It did not always line itself up neatly for conviction. I had built cases on patterns, yes, but also on exceptions. On facts that complicated the first theory. On the stubborn refusal to make evidence say less than it did.
Millie was a vampire. Millie had not hurt me. Millie’s hands were the first kind hands I had felt in two years. The water trembled around my ribs as I breathed.
“I don’t understand what’s happening to me,” I said.
“No,” she said. “You cannot be expected to. Not tonight.”
“What did he do to me?”
She looked toward the closed bathroom door, then back to me.
“He brought you across death before death could keep you.”
A chill moved through me that had nothing to do with the bath.
“I died?”
“For a moment, near enough that the distinction is mostly theological.” Her tone was gentle, but the words did not flinch.
“His blood remade what yours could no longer sustain. You will heal. You will be strong. Too strong, sometimes. Hungry, certainly. Overwhelmed. Angry. There will be much to learn.”
Hungry.
At the word, something inside me stirred.
Not stomach hunger. Not the hollow ache I had lived with so long it became landscape. This was sharper and lower, tied to scent, to pulse, to the memory of Maksym’s wrist against my mouth. Shame flooded me so fast I turned my face away.
Millie saw too much, but she only rinsed the cloth again.
“That part is not wicked,” she said. “It is biology. We will teach you how to live with it without becoming what harmed you.”
I wanted to believe that. I wanted not to want anything.
She finished washing me in pieces. Shoulder, arm, hand. She cleaned between my fingers, beneath my nails, over my wrists with such care that I had to close my eyes.
“His Majesty has much to explain,” she said after a while. “When you are ready, you should eat with him.”
My eyes opened.
“No.”
The word came fast. Stronger than I expected.
Millie nodded once. “Not now, then.”
“No,” I said again, because I needed one refusal in the world to hold. “I don’t want to be alone with him.”
“He will never allow harm to come to you again.”
I searched her face for the trick. Found none.
“He bit me.”
“Yes.”
“He made me drink.”
Her hands stilled.
“Yes.”
The honesty hurt, but less than evasion would have.
“He commanded me.”
Millie’s gaze lowered for a moment. When it rose again, I saw sorrow there. Not pity. Sorrow had more respect in it.
“That is also something he must answer for.”
I swallowed. My throat no longer felt raw. That seemed like betrayal.
“Then why should I eat with him?”
“What sort of profession were you in before?”
The question startled me so badly I stared.
This woman drew answers from me without effort. “I, I was an attorney.”
Millie’s mouth tucked into the smallest smile. “I could hear education in the way you choose your words.”
My eyes burned again. “I was a prosecutor.”
“Then you know the value of questions.”
“I know the value of indictments too.”
This time, the small smile became real.
“Good,” she said. “Hold on to that. Ask him everything when you can bear to. Demand answers. Demand truth. Eat first, perhaps, because fury is exhausting on an empty stomach.”
I looked down at the bathwater. It was no longer clean. Pinkish-gray, clouded with salt and soap and what the night had left on me. Still, I felt cleaner under it than I had before. Not whole. Not close. But the surface of me had been returned to me by inches.
“I’m scared,” I said.
The confession left without permission. Millie set the cloth aside and rested her forearms on the edge of the tub.
“Of course you are.”
“I don’t know what I am.”
“No,” she said. “But you are still Grace Marlow.”
The tears came again, silent and immediate. She reached for my face then, slowly enough that I could turn away. I did not. Her thumb brushed a tear from my cheek.
“You are overwhelmed,” she said. “That is allowed. You are angry. That is allowed, too. You may feel ten things at once and none of them politely. There will be time for all of it.”
“Am I safe?” I asked.
I hated the childlike shape of the question.
“Yes,” she said. “You are safe now.”
I should not have believed her. But Millie’s hands had not lied.
The bath had not lied. The space she gave my fear had not lied.
So I believed her a little. Not enough to face Maksym without shaking.
But enough to let her pull the drain and wrap a towel around my shoulders when the water began to circle away.
She helped me out of the tub.
My legs held better than they had going in. Millie dried me with brisk, gentle efficiency, then brought a thick robe from a hook near a warming rack. It was soft, heavy, and white. When she wrapped it around me, I disappeared inside it.
At the bathroom door, I stopped. Beyond it waited the king. The vampire. The man with my blood on his mouth and his blood in my body.
Millie’s hand found mine again. Warm. Dry.
“You do not have to understand him tonight,” she said quietly. “You only have to let me open the door.”
I looked at her.
“Will you stay?”
“Yes, for a bit.”
No hesitation.
I nodded once.
Millie opened the door and guided me back toward Maksym.