10. Chapter 10
Grace
For a moment after Remington Duval offered me her fealty, no one seemed to know where to put the air.
The room held too much. Too many vows. Too much blood not yet spilled. Too much old power bending itself around a woman who, less than a full day ago by any sane measure of time, had been crawling toward a club door on ruined feet with death already sitting patiently inside her ribs.
Maksym remained before me.
He had lifted his head, but he had not yet risen all the way back into himself.
That was the only way I knew how to name it.
The king was there, of course. He seemed incapable of misplacing that part completely.
But something more dangerous sat beneath the crown now, unguarded and burning, his amber eyes fixed on me as if the laws of the room had changed and he was still deciding whether to obey them or tear them down.
Remy stood a few feet away, her right hand lowered now from her heart. She looked nothing like a woman who had just made a vow that might one day require violence. She looked elegant. Steady. Beautiful in the way knives were beautiful when someone had taken care to polish them.
Taras had moved back from the window, though he had not yet returned to the table. The broken arms of his chair still lay on the polished wood. I could feel him in the room without looking directly at him: the disciplined stillness he wore like armor.
Maksym’s hands rested on his thighs, palms down now. I lifted my hand before I thought better of it.
His cheek was cool beneath my fingers. Not corpse-cold.
Not the horrible dead chill I had expected from the stories humans told to frighten one another.
Cool like stone shaded from summer sun. Smooth except for the faint pull of the scar along his jaw, the double line I had noticed while he slept and had pretended not to want to study.
His eyes changed when I touched him. Not softened; just stilled.
The mate bond answered in me with humiliating immediacy, a low tug beneath my breastbone, a warmth in the blood that was no longer properly mine.
So I did what I had always done when feeling threatened to become unmanageable. I returned to work.
“We still have business to attend to,” I said.
My voice sounded steadier than I felt. Good. I had built a career on that discrepancy. Maksym watched me for one breath longer.
Then the king returned by degrees. His jaw tightened. His shoulders settled. The terrible exposed thing in his eyes did not vanish, but it moved behind structure, behind discipline, behind all the centuries he had apparently spent making himself into something useful instead of merely lethal.
“Yes,” he said.
He rose slowly, not taking my hand with him, not assuming the touch had granted him anything beyond the moment it occupied. That mattered. Every inch of him seemed to know it mattered.
I let my hand fall back into my lap. Remy laughed.
It was not a delicate laugh. It did not apologize for being loud enough to touch the walls.
It rolled through the chamber warm and full and unapologetic, New Orleans curling around the edges of it.
The sound should have been inappropriate after everything I had just said. It was not. It broke the room open.
“Lord, cher,” she said, leaning forward with both hands braced lightly on the table. “You just petted the king like he was a large, gloomy dog and told him to get back to work.”
Taras made that same controlled sound from earlier. Judgmental exhale, apparently.
Maksym looked at Remy. Remy looked back at him with open delight.
I blinked once.
Then, against every rational priority, I almost smiled. “He was brooding.”
“He does that,” Taras said.
Maksym did not look at him. “I am in the room.”
“We are aware,” Taras replied. “It is difficult to miss the atmosphere changing whenever you disapprove of being accurately described.”
Remy’s smile widened. Then she turned that warmth on me, and the humor did not leave her face, but the question beneath it sharpened.
“Please, tell me, cher, I must know. How did you escape Lucian?”
There it was. Not pity. Not awe. Not more vows. A question. I straightened in my chair.
My jaw set. My hands stilled in my lap. Across the table, Taras returned to his notebook. Remy waited. Maksym took the seat beside me, close enough that I felt the pull of him, far enough that I could breathe around it.
I stared at the fire for a moment. Then I began.
“When Lucian brought me to Las Vegas, he put me in a rental house.”
Maksym’s gaze snapped toward me.
“Not far from Amethyst,” I added. “I don’t know the exact address. I was not exactly invited to review the lease terms.”
Remy’s mouth flattened, but she said nothing.
“It was expensive in the way temporary luxury is expensive,” I continued.
“Too clean. Too hard. Travertine tile floors, white walls, rented furniture that had never belonged to anyone long enough to collect a memory. There were thick curtains over every window. Wards, I assume, though at the time I just thought the house felt wrong.”
“Sound-deadening,” Remy said softly. “Spatial fold, perhaps. Privacy work.”
“I suppose, since I honestly have no idea what any of that is,” I said, because honestly the magical terminology was Greek at this point.
“I was kept in a bedroom at the back of the house. The bed frame was wood. Heavy. Decorative. The kind of thing chosen by someone who liked the appearance of warmth better than warmth itself.”
Maksym’s hands were flat on the table again. The wood did not groan this time. Barely.
“Lucian was in a mood,” I said. “That’s the best way to describe it. Excited, maybe. He liked Vegas. Or he liked being near danger in Vegas. He spoke about Amethyst several times.”
The name settled over the room differently when I said it.
“He hated it,” I continued. “Not in a careless way. Personally. He called it a perfumed little throne room for a lesser son playing king.”
Taras went very still. Maksym’s face did not move.
I looked at him anyway. “His words, not mine.”
“I know,” Maksym said.
The softness of his voice frightened me more than rage would have.
“He said your club was arrogance dressed as legitimacy,” I said.
“He said your father had made the world weak by outlawing old customs, and that you were worse because you believed discipline made you noble. He said one day you would learn that all order rots from beneath if enough hungry men are patient.”
Remy’s eyes had gone amber-gold again. I did not look at her too long. There was something intimate about witnessing a person’s magic stir because of your testimony. I had already been witnessed enough for one life.
“Lucian had business that night,” I said.
“Or pleasure. I didn’t always know the difference with him.
He had brought me because he wanted to feed from me while he was here.
He liked symbolic things. He liked thinking himself poetic.
He told me I was proof that your laws had failed right under your nose. ”
The room grew colder.
“I had been weaker than usual for several days,” I said. “That may have been deliberate. He liked making me travel badly. He liked the contrast between expensive rooms and what I looked like inside them.”
I paused there. The words sat beneath my skin with all the good judgment of a wildfire.
“Two years is a long time to learn routines,” I continued. “People underestimate the usefulness of being underestimated. That may be the only consistent advantage I had.”
Taras’s pen moved again.
“Lucian thought captivity made me stupid. Or obedient. Or too tired to be dangerous. Sometimes I was too tired to lift my head. Sometimes I was stupid with hunger. Sometimes obedience was the only way not to make the next hour worse.” I looked down at my hands.
“But I listened. I counted. I memorized footsteps. Door sounds. The timing of meals. Which guards took instructions literally, and which ones liked improvising cruelty into their day.”
“The one in Las Vegas?” Remy asked.
“One guard,” I said. “Lucian left one guard.”
Maksym’s eyes sharpened.
“He believed that was sufficient?” Taras asked, quiet and deadly.
“He believed I was half-dead,” I said. “He was not wrong. That was his mistake.”
Remy’s expression changed at that. Something like admiration moved through her eyes and stayed there.
“The guard had a routine,” I said. “He checked the door every hour when Lucian was out. At first, he stood in the doorway. Later, he came inside. Then he sat on the chair near the dresser. Then he started talking.”
My stomach tightened. I kept my voice flat.
“He wanted a taste of the master’s prize.”
Maksym did not move, but the shadows near the corners of the chamber seemed to thicken. I noticed because I could not help noticing everything now. Darkness obeyed him in a way men should not have been comfortable with. It gathered like hounds awaiting permission.
“He had asked before,” I added. “Lucian had refused him in front of me once and told him he did not share his best things with kennel dogs. The guard hated that. He also liked it. Some people can turn humiliation into appetite if you leave them alone with it long enough.”
Remy murmured something under her breath. It was not English. It sounded like a curse.
“The bed had slats,” I said. “One near the footboard had cracked weeks before. I noticed it because I noticed everything that changed in that room. The crack was small at first. Then one night I worked it loose while pretending to sleep.”
The memory returned through my fingers before it reached my mind.
Wood under nails. My breath held so long my chest hurt. The guard’s footsteps beyond the door. The taste of old blood in my mouth. The terror that one tiny sound would bring Lucian back before the wood came free.
“I hid it under the mattress,” I said. “Not well. There was no well. There was only good enough because they did not think I had the energy to hide anything worth finding.”
“How long?” Maksym asked.
His voice was too quiet.