7. Chapter 7 #2
Not fear of me. Not calculation about his own safety.
No offended royal pride at furniture being threatened in his palace.
His face held something much closer to terror, but not for himself.
For me. His amber eyes tracked every line of my body the way a person watched someone standing at the edge of a roof, one wrong move from falling.
The rage did not vanish. It lost its shape.
My arms began to shake. Not from weight.
From everything else. I lowered the armoire.
It hit the floor too hard. The impact shuddered through the rug, the boards, the soles of my feet.
Somewhere inside it, something small toppled over with a muffled sound.
Then my legs gave.
I slid down the wall beside it, robe gathered in my fists, knees pulling up toward my chest. The sobs came before I could decide whether to permit them. Hard. Ugly. Animal. They tore out of me without rhythm or dignity, wrenching my shoulders forward until my forehead nearly touched my knees.
I had cried in the bath. That had been grief with manners, compared to this. This was not crying. This was collapse.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said, or tried to say. The words broke apart. “I don’t know how to be this.”
The room answered first with silence. I lifted my head enough to see Maksym cross the room toward me.
He did not walk like a king then. Not like a man accustomed to rooms making way for him.
He approached the way a person approached a cornered animal with teeth and a history of traps.
Slow. Low. Hands visible. No sudden angles.
No demand in his body except the terrible patience of someone willing to stop at any moment.
I hated it. I hated that I was the thing being approached that way. Hated that my fear had become visible enough to instruct him. Hated that carefulness could feel like kindness and humiliation at the same time.
He stopped several feet away and lowered himself to one knee. He stayed where he was.
In the dark, with my new eyes and my old grief, I saw too much.
The faint crease between his brows. The tension he held in his shoulders, as if remaining still required more effort than violence would have.
The way one hand rested open on his thigh, palm up, useless unless I chose to make it otherwise.
Every single thing he had done since I collapsed outside Amethyst had been an attempt to help me. The thought came slowly, unwelcome and solid. He was not Lucian. He was not any of them.
My throat tightened around a different kind of terror. Need. I looked up at him through wet lashes.
“Can you please help me?”
Maksym’s face changed. No triumph. No satisfaction. No trace of I told you so. Only tenderness, grave and devastating, as if I had handed him something breakable, and he understood there would be no replacing it if he mishandled the weight.
“Yes, my love,” he said softly. “I want nothing more than to help you.”
He did not move at first. That was the first mercy of my asking: he let the question remain mine for one breath longer before he answered it with his body.
Then Maksym rose from his knee slowly, still watching my face for refusal. When he bent toward me, his arms came into view before the rest of him did, broad hands open, palms turned slightly upward.
He gathered me from the floor as if I weighed nothing, but he did not clutch.
One arm slid behind my back. The other went beneath my knees.
My robe stayed closed because I held it there with both fists, and he gave no sign he noticed anything beyond the fact that I was shaking hard enough to make my teeth chatter.
His chest was solid against my shoulder. Cool through his shirt. Real.
He carried me back to the bed and sat against the headboard with me sideways across his lap, not laying me down, not looming over me.
My legs draped over his thighs. One of his arms wrapped around my back, firm enough to keep me from sliding, loose enough that I could have pushed away.
The torn sheet had been shoved aside. The bed smelled like sleep and silk and him.
My tears had not stopped. They had only quieted into something wet and humiliating along my cheeks.
“I am going to feed you from my vein,” he said.
My body heard that before my mind did. The burn in my throat flared. My mouth filled with want so sharp it made my stomach twist.
Maksym’s arm tightened by a fraction, not restraint. Warning, maybe. Or comfort. “It is the most effective way to get true nourishment into you quickly. Blood wine helps. Mine will help more.”
I swallowed. My throat hurt.
“Is that...” I stopped, started again because cowardice would not serve me. “Is that intimate?”
His gaze held mine. In the darkness, his eyes looked less amber than molten metal banked under ash.
“Yes.”
The answer came without hesitation. I waited for qualification. For euphemism. For some old-world evasion dressed as delicacy. He gave me none.
“It will be the most intimate,” he said. “And you will enjoy it.” His voice lowered, roughened at the edges. “Fuck knows you need something that will feel good to you after so many years of everything feeling like pain.”
The sentence struck a place I had not known was still capable of being struck.
Enjoy it. Feel good.
Those phrases belonged to a language I had not spoken in two years except as evidence of other people’s crimes.
My body had been made into a room where others took pleasure and left pain behind as proof they had been there.
Pleasure had become suspect by association, a word with fingerprints on its throat.
“I don’t know if I can,” I whispered.
“I know.”
“No, I mean—”
“I know what you mean.” His hand moved once against my back, then stilled as if he had remembered not to presume motion. “We do only what you allow. If you begin and want to stop, you stop. If you do not want this, I will call Millie and we will find another way to get enough blood wine into you.”
Millie. The name steadied me. Then another thing arrived, thin and precise beneath the room’s quiet. A presence outside the door. Not sound exactly. Stillness had a texture now. A contained absence of movement, so deliberate it became its own announcement. I turned my head toward the door.
“Someone’s there.”
“Taras,” Maksym said without looking away from me.
“He’s just standing there?”
“Generally, Taras is wherever I am when there is any possibility of danger.”
“Am I the danger?”
“You are newly turned. Young vampires can be unpredictable.”
The word young made something in me bristle. I had been many things: poor, orphaned, over-educated, underestimated, imprisoned, starving. Young was not something I had felt in a very long time.
Maksym must have read the shift on my face because he added, “Not foolish. Not childish. New. Your strength has arrived before your instincts understand its boundaries.”
“And you think I’ll hurt someone?”
“I think you could hurt someone accidentally.”
“My God.” I laughed once, thin and bitter. “Comforting.”
His expression did not change. “You will not harm your mate.”
The word landed in my chest.
Mate.
I had mocked it. Objected to it. Filed several internal motions against its admissibility. But sitting across his lap with hunger in my throat and his arm a careful line along my back, the word did not land cold.
It landed warm.
Not love. Not acceptance. Something more primitive and less negotiable. Recognition, perhaps, as he had said. My body knew it, and my mind hated that my body had taken testimony without counsel present.
“I need you to walk me through it,” I said.
“Of course.”
“Like I am stupid.”
“You are not.”
“Maksym.”
His mouth softened at the sound of his name. “Like you have never done it before, then.”
“Better.”
“I will open the vein in my wrist and place it against your lips. You drink first. Your fangs will descend. You will feel them. Do not fight the sensation.”
My hand curled in his shirt without permission. He glanced down at it, then back at my face.
“You will pay attention to what happens in your mouth,” he continued. “There is venom. It is instinctive, but you can learn to control it. Before you bite, you will feel the instinct; you need to will it through.”
“Will it through.”
“Yes.”
“That is not a medically precise instruction.”
“No. It is a true one.”
I absorbed that unhappily.
“What happens if I don’t?”
“You may tear me.”
My eyes snapped to his.
“I could hurt you?”
“Yes.”
He did not soften it. Did not insult me by pretending otherwise.
“A bite tears flesh,” he said. “It hurts. Venom changes what comes after the piercing. It makes the pain brief and then turns it into pleasure.”
The room went utterly still. Not outside. Not in the palace. In me. Two years rearranged themselves in one sentence.
Bites. So many bites. Teeth tearing into me while I screamed or went silent or left my body because remaining in it was too expensive.
Lucian’s mouth at my throat. Others at my wrists.
My thighs. My breasts. Pain that stayed pain because they wanted it that way.
Because they could have changed it. Because there had been a biological mechanism, a merciful mechanism, and they had withheld it as deliberately as food.
“Those bastards,” I whispered.
Maksym’s face became something terrible.
“Yes,” he said. His accent thickened around the profanity like old iron. “Fucking bastards.”
For reasons I did not want to examine, that helped. He lifted his wrist to his mouth. I watched his fangs descend.
It should have horrified me. It did, in part.
But there was also something clean about it, a visible admission of what he was.
No glamour, no pretending teeth were anything but teeth.
He bit into his own wrist with a controlled precision that made me realize how much skill lived inside violence when someone cared not to be careless.
Blood welled dark and immediate. The scent hit me. My entire body arched toward it.