5. Chapter 5 #2
I knew what mockery sounded like. Condescension had been the background music of my education.
Men in tailored suits had called me impressive in tones that meant unexpected.
Judges had complimented my preparation as if they were rewarding a dog for walking upright.
Opposing counsel had heard my accent and smiled like they had already won.
Maksym did not sound surprised that I could think. He sounded pleased that I still wanted to.
“There is a library,” he said. “Extensive. Texts. Histories. Medical accounts, though some are outdated and others are written by men who should have been forbidden ink. I will have appropriate volumes brought to you.”
“Appropriate according to whom?”
“You, once you are strong enough to object to my selections in detail. You are, of course, welcome to go to the library yourself. But it would be difficult to navigate at first.”
I stared at him. His face remained solemn. Dry humor, then. In the middle of this. Of course. Why should the vampire king not have a sense of humor? Why should monsters not be rounded people?
“I can object now,” I said.
“I have noticed.”
For one unbearable second, the silence between us changed texture. Not safe. Not comfortable. Never that. But less like a locked room.
Then Maksym looked at me, really looked, and said quietly, “You are beautiful.”
Everything inside me stopped. Not froze. Stopped.
The fork hovered halfway between my plate and my mouth.
I had not even realized I had picked it up.
A piece of steak waited on the tines, red at the center, steam faint now but still rising.
My hand held there in the space above the plate while the words traveled through me and found every place compliments had been made into weapons.
Beautiful. Lucian had ironically called me pretty when I was weak enough not to fight.
Pretty when he dressed me in things that made access easier.
Pretty when bruises yellowed at the edges and he liked the contrast. Pretty when he wanted me to know my body had become an object in a room, no more entitled to an opinion than a vase.
My fingers tightened around the fork until the metal bent. Just a little. Enough that both of us saw it. Maksym’s face changed at once. Not alarm for the fork. Not irritation over damaged silver. Regret, sharp and immediate.
“I am sorry,” he said.
I said nothing. The apology hovered uselessly near the blood wine.
I lowered the fork with too much care, straightened it as best I could by pressing it against the edge of the table, and returned the piece of pierced steak to my mouth.
The meat was tender enough to come apart almost before I chewed it.
Salt hit first. Then fat. Then the deep mineral richness of rare beef, red and warm and nearly too close to blood.
My body seized on it with humiliating focus.
Hunger—real hunger, the old human kind, the kind that had lived in my belly for two years—rose behind the newer thirst and reminded me that I had been starved before I had been transformed.
So I ate. I did not savor it. Savoring required leisure, and leisure belonged to people who believed the next meal was likely. I ate the way I had eaten as a child when my grandmother stretched beans and cornbread over too many days and pretended she preferred the heel pieces.
One piece. Chew. Swallow. Another. The steak was already cut into small portions because he had cut it for me. I refused to feel anything about that.
Across from me, Maksym did not speak.
His silence took effort. I could feel that without supernatural assistance. He wanted to do things. That much was obvious. Offer water. Pour more wine. Tell me to slow down. Ask if the meat pleased me. Touch my wrist when my hand trembled.
He did none of it. His hands remained flat on the table. Not reaching. Not taking. Not even offering, which I had begun to understand could be its own pressure when one person held all the power and the other had no shoes, no money, no living family, and a new body built without her consent.
I took another sip of blood wine.
The steak disappeared piece by piece. My stomach should have cramped at the sudden food. It did not. My body absorbed everything with efficient, frightening gratitude. The more I ate, the more present I became, and the more present I became, the harder it was to hide from the facts of the room.
I was clean. I was fed. I was not chained. A vampire king sat across from me and kept his hands where I could see them because I had flinched when he touched me. The next question came out of me because practical terror was safer than grief.
“Do I sleep?”
Maksym’s brows drew together slightly, not with confusion, but as if he had been bracing for another indictment and instead received a procedural inquiry.
I turned the blood wine glass between my fingers.
“I mean, do I need to sleep? Can I sleep? Am I going to close my eyes and wake up in a coffin? Or not wake up at all until sunset? I should warn you, the only vampire stories I know involve sparkling, emotional teenagers who never sleep and apparently do not eat anything but deer and unresolved tension. I am aware that is not a rigorous source base.”
Maksym stared at me. Then he laughed.
Not politely. Not the little restrained sound powerful men used when they wanted a woman to know she had amused them, but not enough to disturb their dignity.
This was real. Full and startled, pulled from somewhere beneath the crown he could have been wearing, beneath the blood, beneath all that careful stillness.
It warmed his face and changed the air around him.
The scar on his jaw moved with it. His eyes creased at the corners, which told me he laughed often.
The sound was beautiful. Because apparently the night had not finished insulting me.
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
It was short. Rusted. More surprise than humor.
The instant I heard myself, I clapped a hand over my mouth like I had broken a rule.
My whole body went tense, waiting for consequence. None came.
Maksym’s laughter softened first, then faded, but something of it remained in his face. He looked younger for half a breath. Not young. There were centuries in him no amount of good lighting could hide. But less carved. Less weaponized.
“I apologize,” he said, though the corner of his mouth had not fully obeyed him. “I was not laughing at you.”
“So you have said.”
“This time, I was laughing at the deer. And, of course, the sparkling.”
Despite myself, something tried to rise in my chest again.
“Do not make me defend the deer and sparkling literature,” I said. “I am operating with limited materials.”
His smile quieted into something almost tender.
“You sleep,” he said. “And you will need it tonight. The transition takes energy, even with my blood driving it. You may sleep deeply. You may wake disoriented. You may dream strangely. None of that means anything is wrong.”
“Coffin?”
He coughed to suppress another laugh. “No.”
“Sunlight?”
“You will tolerate it better than made vampires typically do because my blood turned you. Born vampire’s blood carries certain advantages. But we will test nothing until your body stabilizes.”
“Made vampires,” I repeated.
“Yes. Vampires who were once human and were turned.”
“Like me.”
His expression shifted, but he did not flinch from the answer. “Yes.”
“And born vampires are what? Genetic aristocracy?”
That almost-smile returned, smaller and drier. “Something like that.”
“Of course.”
“Human food is not necessary as it once was,” he continued, letting me have the sarcasm without taking the bait.
“You will not starve without it if you have blood. But protein is useful during the first days, especially after trauma and starvation. Your body remembers its old requirements even as it learns new ones.”
I looked at my empty plate. After trauma and starvation. The phrase was clinical enough to be bearable.
“And after that?” I asked.
“You may eat because you enjoy it. Good food remains one of the pleasures that does not have to end merely because life has changed shape.”
Changed shape. That was one way to phrase death.
I lifted the glass and drank again because apparently my hand had decided to collaborate with my enemy. The blood wine no longer shocked me in the same way. It settled into my body with a dark, awful rightness.
“So blood sustains us,” I said, and heard the pronoun too late.
Us. Maksym heard it too. His face did not change, which I appreciated more than I wanted to.
“Yes,” he said. “Blood sustains us.”
“How?”
His gaze sharpened with approval before he hid it. Good Lord. I was not a law student seeking praise from a professor. I was a dead woman with a half-empty glass of blood wine and no shoes.
Still, the part of me that had once lived by questions sat forward in the chair.
“How much?” I asked. “How often? From whom? What happens if I do not drink? What happens if I drink too much? Can I hurt someone accidentally? Can I stop once I start?”
“One question at a time.”
“No.”
His mouth twitched.
I pointed the fork at him before remembering it had bent earlier. “You said I would be taught. Consider this the introductory lecture.”
He leaned back slightly, not away from me exactly, but into the sort of posture men took when preparing to answer under oath.
“We maintain a regulated donor system,” he said. “Willing humans. Paid extremely well. Screened medically and magically. Protected by contract and by Crown law. They set limits. Those limits are enforced. A donor may revoke consent at any time.”
I listened without moving.
“There are donors in Amethyst,” he continued. “There are also private arrangements for those who prefer discretion. No vampire under my rule is permitted to feed from an unwilling human. No coercive debt structures. No hidden corrals. No blood slaves.”