Page 7 of Maksym

Then at me.

Her gaze held mine only a moment, but it was enough to land like judgment. Fear remained there. Confusion. Accusation I deserved and did not. The bond reached toward her with all its old hunger for recognition, and found no welcome.

Good, I told myself. Let her hate you if hatred keeps her spine straight.

Her eyes returned to Millie.

A long pause followed. Her lips parted, closed, parted again. The first attempt produced no sound.

Millie waited.

At last, barely above a whisper, the woman on my bed answered.

“Grace.”

The name moved through the room softly.

Grace.

Not blood slave.

Not victim.

Not evidence of a crime committed under my Crown.

Grace.

My hands had been balled at my sides. I had not realized it until my fingers began, slowly, to open.

Millie smiled. Not too much. Just enough warmth to survive by.

“Grace,” she repeated. “That is a lovely name.”

Grace looked down at the blood on the sheets as if the name had cost her something to say.

I stood in my own chamber, surrounded by dark wood and old power, with my twin at the door and the woman who had raised me sitting between my mate and the worst of my instincts. I had saved Grace’s life. I had also ended it in the form she had known.

Both truths remained.

Neither forgave the other.

But her name was Grace, and she had spoken it.

For the first time since the bond struck, I felt the smallest part of the night loosen its teeth.

Chapter 2

Grace

His mouth was on my throat, and the word please had not finished dying between us.

I did not know whether I had offered it to him, to God, to death, or to the part of me that still remembered how to ask instead of endure. It hung in the air above me, thin and useless, another small human thing swallowed by a room too large, too rich, too cold to have any mercy in it.

Then his teeth went in.

Pain should have been simple. I had known pain long enough to recognize its handwriting. Pain was a language with grammar. Pressure first. Split skin. Heat. The body’s stupid surprise. Then the deep, humiliating knowledge that there was nowhere to put yourself where the hurt could not follow.

But this bite was not like the others.