Page 8 of Maksym

The others had taken. They had chewed pieces from me without chewing. They had made my body a cup and my fear part of the drink. They had laughed when I cried, or worse, had not noticed. They had fed from my wrists when my throat was too torn, from my inner arms when my wrists had swollen, from the soft bend behind my knees when Lucian wanted me unable to walk the next day. I had learned the difference between hunger and entertainment. Hunger was quicker.

This man—this vampire—bit me with terrible precision.

That frightened me more.

His hand cradled the back of my head. Not kindly. Not cruelly. Carefully, as if my skull were some breakable thing he had no intention of breaking unless necessary. His other hand gripped the headboard above me, and somewhere through the haze I heard wood crack. The sound was sharp as a gunshot, but far away, as if it belonged to another house, another woman, another throat.

Mine had become a door.

He drank.

My body gave a weak, startled jerk beneath him. I did not have strength left to fight. That almost made me laugh, except I could not breathe well enough for laughter. Two years of promising myself that if I ever got one chance—one honest chance—I would claw, bite, spit, stab, burn, run, anything. I would not be docile. I would not make it easy. I would not die on my back if I could die standing.

In the end, I had run until my legs forgot the argument for movement, and now I was on my back, anyway.

The ceiling above him blurred.

Gold. Shadow. The suggestion of carved stone. Sheets beneath me that felt too soft against skin that had forgotten softness.

A hand at my throat. A mouth at my throat.

Please.

Now his mouth was at my throat, and my heart was slowing beneath it.

There was no drama in dying. That surprised me. I had expected panic until the end, a wild clawing at the edge, some final refusal built into blood and bone. Instead, after the terror and pain had spent themselves, there was quiet. A widening. My body grew heavy, but the heaviness was not cruel. It lay itself over me like a blanket.

Beat. The pull at my throat deepened. Beat.

His fingers tightened behind my head, and I felt, distantly, the tremor that moved through him. Or through me. I could no longer tell where I ended. That seemed all right. Borders had always been violated, anyway.

Beat.

My grandmother’s porch appeared behind my eyes. Not clearly. Nothing so kind as that. Just the sound of cicadas in the Tennessee heat and the smell of beans simmering with salt pork because we were poor but not unloved. Her hand on the back of my neck when I cried over scholarship forms. Her voice telling me, Gracelyn, there are people who will take one look at where you came from and decide what you are worth. Let them be wrong.

I had let them be wrong. For a while.

Vanderbilt. Law Review. Order of the Coif. Courtrooms where men in expensive suits mistook my accent for ignorance and regretted it on cross-examination. Rows of financial records. Shell companies. Human trafficking indictments built one transaction at a time. My life had once been paper and coffee and righteous fury, so clean it almost made me holy.

Then it had been chains.

Beat. Pause. I sank. Something in me opened its hands.

All right, I thought, though I did not know whom I was answering. All right. I’m tired now.

The mouth left my throat. The absence hurt worse than the bite.

Air scraped into me, or tried to. My body jerked around it. There was a sound above me, low and urgent, words I could not understand because my hearing had gone underwater. A shadow moved. Warmth against my mouth. Wetness. The press of flesh to my lips.

Blood.

I knew it before I tasted it. The smell crawled straight down the back of my throat and woke some sick part of me that captivity had trained too well. Blood meant feeding. Blood meant vampires. Blood meant pain, because they always made it pain, even when they smiled.

It slid over my tongue. Metallic. Coppery. Thick.

My stomach clenched. Reflex made me swallow once before disgust caught up with me. I tried to turn my head away. It was hardly a movement. The grand sum of my rebellion was maybe an inch of refusal against a wrist I could not push aside.

No.