Page 93 of Maksym

“Father.”

“I trust you’ve kept things on an even keel?”

“As even as the keel may be kept, sir.”

My father’s gaze flicked briefly to mine. Dry humor moved there and vanished before witnesses could accuse him of being approachable.

“My wife is still in the training yard,” he continued, turning slightly as if to draw us farther into the house. “She insisted she had time to finish before you arrived, which meant she did not.”

Before anyone could answer, a voice rang from somewhere deeper in the estate.

“Come on, Axiom, shit! I think they’re here!”

The words bounded into the foyer with the lyrical brightness of a hymn that had learned profanity and found it useful.

Grace went very still. My father closed his eyes for half a second. I did not smile. I was almost certain I had not. Devon rounded the corner at speed.

She wore gold-and-white battle leathers fitted for movement rather than display, the pale armor catching lantern-light along reinforced seams and buckles. A sword rested at her hip. Her white-blonde hair had been pulled into a high ponytail but was escaping in unruly waves around her face and neck, as if even leather ties understood they were temporary suggestions. Her skin carried that faint luminescence no human foundation could imitate, not glowing exactly, but lit from some place beneath blood.

In one hand, she held the remains of a frosted cinnamon roll. The other hand was extended behind her, fingers sticky with white icing and held dangerously close to the massive hellhound padding after her.

Axiom emerged from the corridor with the casual horror of a nightmare that had decided to become a house pet.

He was enormous, shoulder nearly to Devon’s ribs, black as furnace soot with muscle moving beneath his hide like coiled rope. His eyes burned ember-red. His mouth was too large, too full of teeth, and currently dripping frosting in long, obscene strings over his lower jaw. Smoke curled faintly from his nostrils. Claws clicked against the stone floor with each step.

Grace stared. Axiom’s tongue swiped the side of his muzzle, collecting icing from one row of teeth.

Devon stopped in the center of the foyer, apparently registering all of us at once.

“Oh,” she said. “Good. We made it.”

She looked down at the cinnamon roll in her hand. Then left. Then right. As if the grand foyer might discreetly provide a small pastry altar.

My father stepped toward her.

“Here, my darling.”

His voice changed for her. Not dramatically. Kazimir did not perform tenderness. He allowed it to exist, which was far more dangerous to those of us who knew him.

He took her sticky wrist gently, relieved her of the pastry with his other hand, and passed it backward without looking.

Tilden had already appeared with a small silver plate. Of course he had. The pastry landed upon it with dignity it had not earned.

Tilden also produced a damp cloth from somewhere within the laws of household sorcery and offered it to my father. Kazimir cleaned Devon’s fingers with the attention of a monarch sealing a treaty. Each sticky digit, the heel of her palm, the delicate line between thumb and forefinger. Devon watched him with an expression that was half amusement, half adoration, and entirely hers.

“There was a frosting emergency,” she said.

“So I see.”

“Axiom was starving.”

Axiom’s mouth dripped icing onto the stone.

“He appears near death,” my father said.

Devon’s lips twitched. A bit of frosting remained at the corner of her mouth. My father saw it. He handed the cloth back to Tilden, cupped Devon’s chin with two fingers, and kissed the frosting from her lips. Quietly. Deliberately. Not indecent. More intimate than indecency could ever manage.

Grace’s breath shifted beside me. I did not look at her. I could not. There were moments in a family when witnesses either belonged enough to see or did not belong and should look away. Grace stood between those categories, and I felt the crossing like a door opening.