Page 14 of Maksym

“All right,” she said. “We will go slowly.”

We. The word should have been nothing. It was not. She helped me undress.

There was no graceful way to do it. The fabric stuck to places where blood had dried. When she eased it away from my shoulder, I hissed through my teeth and grabbed the edge of the counter hard enough that the stone complained beneath my fingers. Millie paused until I nodded.

Piece by piece, the last of my captivity came off. The dress fell in a filthy heap.

Old bruises spread across my ribs in sick yellows and greens. Bite marks clustered at my throat, wrists, inner arms, breasts, thighs—places I could not bear to name even inside my own head. Some had healed badly. Some had not healed at all until whatever had happened in the other room began closing them from beneath.

Millie saw all of it. Her face did not harden. It did not crumple. She did not gasp and make me comfort her horror.

“You are doing very well,” she said.

A laugh scraped out of me before I could stop it. It sounded awful.

“No, I’m not.”

It was the first full sentence I had spoken since giving my name. Millie’s eyes came back to mine.

“My dear,” she said gently, “you are sitting upright after surviving what should have killed you several times over. We shall not be stingy with credit.”

I felt something under my breastbone shake once, hard, like a door kicked from the other side.

Millie helped me into the bath.

The water closed around my feet first, then calves, knees, thighs. Heat struck the bites and split skin with a bright sting that made me grip her forearm. She let me. Her sleeve bunched under my fingers. I expected her to pull away when my nails dug in.

She did not.

“Breathe,” she murmured. “In if you wish. Out if you can. That is all.”

I lowered myself inch by inch until the water held my hips, my ribs, my shoulders. The salts burned at first. Then, slowly, the burn changed. Not gone. Nothing was gone. But softened around the edges. The water took the weight of my limbs, and for the first time since waking under his mouth, I felt something like gravity loosen its claim.

My hair floated in dark tangles around me. Millie knelt beside the tub and rolled up her sleeves.

“I am going to wash your hair now,” she said. “You may tell me to stop.”

I did not believe I could tell anyone to stop and have it matter.

Still, I whispered, “All right.”

She used a cup first, pouring warm water carefully over my scalp, shielding my eyes with one hand. The first rinse turned brownish-red as it ran down my shoulders. Dirt, blood, alley grime, old sweat. I watched it curl into the bathwater and felt shame rise hot and useless in my throat.

Millie reached for a bottle and worked soap between her palms. Her fingers touched my scalp. I went still. No one had touched my hair kindly since my grandmother died. That was the thought that ruined me.

Not the bite. Not the blood. Not the king in the next room. Not the impossible fact that my body had become something I could not yet name. It was Millie’s fingers easing into the knots with patient care, refusing to yank, refusing to curse the tangles, simply working through what neglect and terror had made.

My grandmother used to comb my hair on Sunday nights. She would sit in the old kitchen chair with me on a pillow at her feet, a towel around my shoulders, telling me stories about women in our family who buried husbands, raised children, planted beans, carried shotguns, and never once asked the world to be gentle before they survived it.

I had survived. I had not survived cleanly. Maybe nobody did. Tears slid down my face, quiet at first, then faster. They fell from my chin into the bathwater and vanished.

“There now,” Millie said, not as comfort exactly, but as acknowledgment. “There you are.”

I covered my mouth with one wet hand. My shoulders shook. I did not want Maksym to hear me through the door. Then I remembered I had heard heartbeats in another room and knew, with a sick certainty, that he could hear every breath if he wanted.

That made me cry harder.

Millie rinsed my hair with the handheld faucet, warm water running clean, then cleaner. She did not rush me out of tears. She did not tell me I was brave. Bravery was too heavy a thing to hand someone while they were naked in a stranger’s bathtub.