9. Chapter 9
Maksym
Grace stared down into the mug for several seconds. Her thumbs rested along the curve of the ceramic. The red tint on her mouth had softened slightly where she had pressed her lips together. Her eyeliner remained flawless. The woman looked prepared to cross-examine her own ruin.
When she spoke, her voice had changed. Not empty. Never that. Disciplined.
“I was an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Arizona,” she said. “My work focused on complex financial crime and trafficking cases.”
Taras’s pen touched paper. The scratch began. Grace heard it. Her eyes flicked briefly toward him.
“You can take notes.”
“I intended to,” Taras said.
“I assumed.”
A shadow of something moved near her mouth. Not humor, but its skeletal remains.
She took a sip of coffee, swallowed, and continued.
“Lucian Devereux presented publicly as a real estate investor with a financial services arm attached. Finance and stock trading. Private investments. Commercial property. Some development. Some charitable giving where the numbers were clean enough to be smug about it.”
Remy sat still at the head of the table, hands folded now, no longer annexing space with posture. She listened like a ward being laid: silent, precise, meant to hold.
“My office had seen his name before,” Grace said. “Not as a target. As a peripheral entity. A transaction here. A property transfer there. A wire routed through an account that had no business touching another account. Nothing obvious enough for a normal review to prioritize.”
Her fingers tightened around the mug.
“But I built my reputation on things that weren’t obvious. That was my value. I saw patterns. Irregularities. Threads that didn’t belong.”
She looked briefly at Lucian’s photograph, still angled away from her but not fully hidden.
“I pulled one.”
Taras wrote faster.
“What thread?” I asked quietly.
Grace did not look offended by the interruption. Perhaps because I asked like a man gathering evidence, not one doubting her.
“A sequence of trades connected to commercial acquisitions in Phoenix,” she said.
“Too well-timed. Too insulated. The entities involved changed names, but the behavior repeated. Shell layers, proxy managers, charitable cover, some limited partnerships that should have been dormant but moved money at convenient times.”
Her voice steadied as she entered the familiar terrain of fraud.
“Most people think financial crime is about greed. It is, but greed is rarely original. Money leaves habits. Even laundered money. Especially laundered money. People think washing something makes it untraceable. It mostly makes them repeat their preferred method of washing.”
Taras paused long enough to glance at me.
I knew that look.
Grace had just become even more dangerous to Lucian than I had already believed.
She continued, “At first I thought securities fraud. Then maybe political corruption. Then human trafficking. The structure looked too much like cases I had prosecuted before. Legitimate business fronts. Cash movement. Properties held through layers. People with expensive lawyers who thought complexity was innocence.”
Her mouth tightened.
“I asked questions.”
Something cold moved through my blood.
“Who knew?” Remy asked, her voice careful.
“My unit. My supervisor. Some agency partners. I had not opened a formal indictment path yet. I was still building predication. Quietly, or I thought quietly.”
She looked into her coffee.
“Lucian got wind of it.”
No one spoke.
I saw it then—not in detail, but in the slight alteration of her face. The distance she forced between herself and the next set of words. A courtroom distance. The kind that allowed a person to describe blood on walls without becoming the person who had touched it.
“I was ambushed in a parking garage,” Grace said.
My fangs ached.
I did not move.
“I had worked late. That was normal. I was carrying a laptop bag and a case file box. I remember being irritated because one of the elevators was out again, and I had heels on because I’d been in court earlier.
There were two men. Human, I think. Compelled, maybe. I didn’t know about compulsion then.”
Her voice remained flat.
“One approached from behind a concrete pillar. The other came from the stairwell. I reached for my phone. I was struck before I could unlock it. Not enough to incapacitate me. Enough to disorient. They knew what they were doing.”
Taras’s pen had stopped.
Remy’s eyes had gone amber-gold again, but dimly, banked fire.
“They put something over my mouth. Chemical. I fought. I remember biting someone’s hand. I remember my knee connecting with something. I remember thinking that if I could just make enough noise, someone would come.”
She looked up then. Her eyes found mine.
“No one came.”
The sentence held no accusation toward me. That did not spare me.
I had no jurisdiction over that garage then. No knowledge of her existence. No way to have known. None of that mattered to the old brutal arithmetic inside me that insisted what had happened to my mate was a failure of the world I ruled and the bloodline I bore.
Grace looked away first.
“When I woke, Lucian was there.”
The name seemed to lower the temperature of the room.
“He was pleased,” she said. “That was the first thing I understood. Not angry. Not rushed. Pleased.”
Her voice remained clipped, but the fingers around the mug had gone white.
“He told me I had become irritating. Not dangerous yet, he said. Irritating. Like a clever insect near his ear. He said killing me would have been easy, but easy things lacked artistry.”
A tremor crossed her mouth. She controlled it.
“He said it was a great joke to take me instead. A federal prosecutor who hunted traffickers, made into property. He liked that part. He repeated it often.”
The mug cracked. Not fully. A thin line appeared near Grace’s thumb and raced down toward the base.
She stared at it. I reached very slowly for the spare cup Millie had left on the tray and placed it near her without touching her hands.
Grace transferred the coffee with careful precision.
A small spill darkened the polished table.
No one commented. She resumed as though a court reporter had asked her to continue.
“I don’t know where I was held.”
Taras’s head lifted.
Grace noticed. “Not at first. Not clearly. I was moved. More than once, I think. Sedated sometimes. Blindfolded sometimes. There were rooms with no windows. Concrete under rugs. Expensive sheets over mattresses bolted to frames. Wards, though I didn’t know that word. Places that felt... wrong.”
Remy’s fingers flexed once.
“Wrong how?” the witch asked.
Grace closed her eyes briefly. “Like sound didn’t travel properly. Like the air stopped at the walls.”
“Warded holding rooms,” Remy said quietly.
Grace opened her eyes. “Yes, well. I called them cells.”
Remy inclined her head. Grace took another sip of coffee from the new mug.
“People came and went. Vampires. Mostly men. Some women. Some looked like business associates. Some like old money. Some like they enjoyed being cruel because it made them feel sophisticated.”
She swallowed.
“One name I heard often was Alistaire Crowe. An Elder. Lucian said his name in front of me more than once. Crowe visited often. He brought others with him.”
Taras wrote the name down. The letters looked like a death sentence even from where I sat.
“Did Crowe feed from you?” I asked.
Grace’s gaze moved to mine. The answer was in the silence before she spoke.
“Yes.”
My vision narrowed. I placed both hands flat on the table and felt the wood groan beneath my palms. I eased the pressure away before it broke. Grace saw that too. I forced my fingers to relax one by one.
She continued.
“I never saw the other slaves.”
Her voice changed on slaves. Just slightly. A hairline fracture in glass.
“I heard them.”
No one breathed. Not even those of us who did not need to.
“Crying through walls. Sometimes screaming. Sometimes praying. Sometimes begging in languages I didn’t know. There was a woman who sang once. Very softly. I thought I was hallucinating her, but one of the guards told her to shut up, so she was real.”
Grace’s eyes had gone bright. The tears did not fall yet.
“I tried to map the place by sound. Footsteps. Doors. Plumbing. Voices. Anything. It was hard because I was hungry most of the time, and after feeding I was weak.”
She stopped. Her throat moved.
“They fed carefully,” she said. “That was part of the system. Never enough to kill. Not unless they meant to discard someone. Rotation. Schedules. Rest periods just long enough to keep the body functional. Iron supplements in food when they remembered food. Broth. Protein. Water. They understood the biology of keeping a human alive as supply.”
The first tear fell. She did not wipe it. It tracked down her cheek, over skin too healed for what she described.
“The bites were deliberate. Wrists when they wanted clean access. Throat when they wanted fear. Inner arm if they had company and wanted fewer visible marks. They knew how to take and take and leave the heart beating.”
I had heard torture before. I had witnessed confession under duress, war reports, the guttural inventory of battlefield suffering. I had seen my father flay liars with words until they begged for blades. None of it compared to the obscenity of Grace’s restraint.
She spoke as though every sentence needed to be admissible.
And still her tears fell.
“They used my blood,” she said.
Her voice dropped. Taras went utterly still. Remy’s eyes closed once, slowly, then opened.
Grace looked down at the table, but she did not stop.
“They used it to prepare me. Warm. Slick. Mine. They would feed first, sometimes from the wrist, sometimes the thigh, wherever they wanted. Then they used what spilled to make sure my body could be violated thoroughly. Efficiently. No part of me was off-limits because no part of me was considered mine.”