Page 71 of Kazimir

Then he was gone, and the chamber felt smaller without him in it.

The quiet that followed was not the earlier, strategic kind. It was the exhausted after-silence of something hard survived.

Kazimir turned my chair toward him and crouched in front of me. A vampire king lowering himself to eye level should have looked absurd. It looked like the world setting itself right.

His hands came to my knees first, then slid upward to hold my thighs just above them. Warm now from recent blood and whatever passed for recent miracles in us.

“Talk to me,” he said.

I let out a breath that went ragged halfway through. “I am furious.”

“Good.”

“I am also scared.”

“That is sensible.”

“And I hate that my fear is sensible.” My laugh was brief and ugly. “I hate that he still gets to alter the temperature in a room just by being named. I hate that part of me still wants to apologize every time I take up too much space with what he did.”

His eyes sharpened with something dark and ancient, and deeply unpleasant for my enemies. “Do not ever apologize to me for bleeding where he cut you.”

The sentence went through me clean as a blade and lodged in the softest part of my chest.

I swallowed. “I know. I just…” I touched my sternum with two fingers, trying and failing to find a neat word. “Sometimes my body behaves like the past is present tense.”

His thumbs moved once, stroking the inner line of my thighs through the fabric of my slacks. “Then we teach it new grammar.”

That was such a Kazimir thing to say that I actually smiled.

“There,” he murmured, and some of the frost left his face. “Better.”

I reached for him because I had to. My fingers found the side of his jaw, the hard line softened by the angle of kneeling. “You kept your cool very well when I retold the story,” I said quietly. “I hated having to repeat it in front of you.”

“I hated hearing it again, my love. But the pride I felt at being your mate and seeing how very brave you are pushed the anger to the corner.”

“Truly?”

He held my gaze. “You are everything to me, Devon. I know how difficult standing up for yourself must have been. And honestly, cruelty always tells the same story. Men in power who mistake access for entitlement rarely have any creativity in and of themselves.”

I stared at him a moment, then huffed a laugh I hadn’t earned. “That was almost funny.”

“It was not intended to be.”

“That made it more funny.”

His mouth twitched. Victory.

I slid forward in the chair until my knees bracketed him more fully. My hands moved into his hair almost without thought, combing the black silk back from his temples. “Thank you for not making me smaller in there.”

The expression that crossed his face was too old and too raw to be called anything other than adoration. “I would burn this city first.”

“I know,” I whispered.

And I did know. Not abstractly. Not in the pretty-story way women were told men would wreck the world for them. I knew it in the bone-deep, frighteningly practical sense that if enough pressure were applied to the wrong point, Kazimir would become catastrophe in a suit.

The knowledge should have scared me. It mostly made me want to kiss him until the line between war and worship blurred.

Maybe he saw that happen on my face. Maybe the bond passed the thought over whole. His gaze dropped once to my mouth and rose again.