Page 24 of Maksym

Her voice gained speed, not from ease but from the old wound of being underestimated, touched now by the absurdity of this newer fate.

“I worked for everything. I clawed my way through school. Vanderbilt Law because I got a scholarship and because I was too stubborn to let people who smirked at me be right. First in my class. Law Review. Federal clerkship. Assistant United States Attorney. I built my life out of spite and coffee and whatever my grandmother taught me about not bowing my head to people who confuse money with worth.”

She swallowed hard. I did not breathe.

“And then she died while I was still in law school. My last person. Gone.” Her voice softened on that, and the softness carried more grief than the anger had. “My parents. My grandmother. Every bit of love I trusted, taken. So I made the law my family. I made work my church. I put traffickers in prison. I followed money because money always tells on sin if you know how to listen.”

Grace’s eyes focused on me again, and the fury returned because grief without fury would have swallowed her.

“Then Lucian Devereux found me. Or I found him. I don’t even know anymore.”

Finally, a name. Lucian Devereux. He thinks he’s untouchable. He will soon learn how touchable he is.

She continued. “Two years. Two years of being food. Two years of being punished for surviving. Two years of learning exactly what vampires are.”

“Some vampires,” I said quietly.

She pointed at me. “Do not.”

I closed my mouth.

“Not yet,” she said. “You don’t get that correction yet.”

Fair.

She pushed damp hair back from her face with a shaking hand. “And now you’re telling me that after all of that, some mythical goddess looked down at the smoking ruin of my life and decided, you know what Gracelyn Marlow needs? A vampire mate.”

She laughed again, but it broke before it finished.

“Not just a vampire. A king. Because apparently regular nightmares weren’t ambitious enough.”

“Grace—”

“I sound insane.” Her voice dropped, and for the first time the anger faltered into something more frightening. “I can hear myself. I sound like I’ve lost my mind.”

“No.”

“Yes.” She looked around the room—the stone, the silk, the old furniture, the decanter full of blood wine catching light like something ceremonial and obscene. “I’m sitting in a palace after being turned into a vampire by a man who says I’m his mate because a goddess chose me. That is not a sentence a sane woman says.”

“You are sane.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know shock. I know trauma. I know the mind can fracture around impossible things and still remain itself.”

I reached across the table. It was a mistake.

Not because I moved quickly. I did not. Not because I meant harm. I meant comfort, which was sometimes only another name for selfishness if offered to someone who had not asked. My hand covered hers for the briefest moment.

She snatched it back.

Her whole body followed. Shoulder, spine, breath. A flinch so deep it had no relation to thought. Reflex dragged her away before choice could speak. The chair legs rasped beneath her. Her hand folded against her chest as if burned.

I withdrew at once. The bond snarled. I silenced it.

“I am sorry,” I said.

She stared at my hand where it had retreated to my side of the table.