Page 220 of Maksym

White walls. Concrete floor. Drain in the center. Cots lined too close together. Men and women sat or lay beneath gray blankets, their faces blurred, their bodies not blurred enough to hide the truth of them: thin wrists, bruised arms, bandaged necks, hair cut short where it had matted or been gripped. A metal cart stood near the door with medical supplies arranged in trays. Not healing supplies. Maintenance supplies. The difference was visible to anyone who had ever been kept alive because death would inconvenience the owner.

The chamber breathed around me. I did not.

On-screen, a guard entered. A human man on one cot tried to stand and failed. Another human reached for him and withdrew immediately when the guard looked over.

A scream came from somewhere beyond the camera’s view. Raw. Human. Unedited.

The sound entered the Council chamber and struck bone.

No one mistook it for theater. No supernatural creature, no matter how old or cruel or bored, could pretend that particular sound had been made for pleasure. Terror had a plainness to it. Pain had no accent.

The screen changed locations again. Another holding room. Smaller. Darker. A chained door. A woman sobbing somewhere out of frame. A man whispering prayers in a language I did not know. Another vampire, face visible for half a second before the footage paused and enhanced the angle enough to show his profile beside Lucian’s.

Then another cut. Another property. Another room.

A spreadsheet flashed briefly before the images resumed. Dates. initials. blood type. “Yield.” “Recovery period.” “Transport status.”

Someone in the gallery whispered a curse.

The Magistrate did not silence it.

Perhaps he should have. Perhaps procedure required it. But some sounds were less disruption than testimony.

I watched the screen and felt the old room inside myself.

Not the office. Not the holding rooms on the video. Mine. The room where Lucian had kept me for much of those two years. The bed. The restraints. The chair he favored. The way hunger reduced thought until the world narrowed to the next swallow, the next moment he did not enter, the next chance to save enough strength to remain myself even if no one ever came.

He had told me more than once that the world had already forgotten me. He had been wrong. The screen proved it in front of everyone.

Another cut.

The image stabilized slowly, as if taken from a camera with poor light. For half a second, I did not understand what I was seeing. Then I did.

My own face filled the screen.

Not the face I wore in the chamber. Not the woman in formal black with vampire blood beneath her skin and a king’s bond burning somewhere deeper than marrow.

This woman was gaunt.

Her cheekbones looked sharp enough to break through skin. Her lips were cracked. Her hair hung dull and tangled around her face. The blurred edge of a restraint crossed near one wrist, though Lucia’s team had cropped most of the frame with almost merciful precision. My eyes were open.

That was the worst part. Not the thinness. Not the bruising. Not the visible ruin hunger and use had made of me.

The eyes. They were mine. They were open. They were still counting. The chamber turned toward me.

I felt it before I saw it. Attention had weight when so many old creatures carried it. It pressed against my cheek, my throat, my shoulders. Disbelief first, because many of them had seen me question witnesses, break Lucian’s wrists, stand before the Council and argue jurisdiction like I had been born in court robes instead of turned in desperation. The mind resisted placing that woman on the screen inside this body at the front of the chamber.

Then horror. Then, in a few faces, shame. Those were the ones that stayed with me.

Not the outrage. Outrage was cheap in public. Horror could be honest or fashionable depending on who watched. Shame required a private admission: that something had rotted beneath their world’s floorboards and they had not smelled it because they had not wanted to bend low enough.

I did not look away from the screen. I owed that woman that much.

She had carried me here. Starved, frightened, furious in scraps, trained to survive hour by hour because days were too large. She had not known Maksym waited somewhere beyond the warded dark. She had not known a mate bond would snap into place when a stranger took her hand outside a club she had reached on the last animal instinct of escape. She had not known she would stand before a Supreme Council and make her captor’s name sound smaller than the law.

She had only known she did not want to die. I stood for her. My hands remained still. My spine stayed straight. The footage held a moment longer, then cut away.

Several in the chamber exhaled as if they had been permitted to breathe only after my face disappeared.