Page 110 of Maksym

I looked at Maksym then.

“I think I’d like to go back to the estate,” I said quietly.

Chapter 15

Maksym

The private executive hallway behind Obsidian’s public rooms had been built for discretion, not mercy. It swallowed music, muted footfalls, and gave powerful creatures a place to compose their faces before returning to the beautiful theater of appetite below.

Purple light did not reach this far. Here, the sconces burned low and gold against dark paneled walls, old brass fittings, and carpet thick enough to forgive violence if violence ever became necessary. The air carried leather, polished wood, a trace of ward-smoke from Amelia’s protections, and beneath it all, the distant throb of Obsidian’s main floor continuing without us.

Grace stood with her back against the wall. Not trapped. Not cornered. She had chosen the wall. I knew the difference.

Her palms were pressed flat against the paneling behind her, fingers spread, as if she needed to remind herself that the world still contained solid things. Her chin remained lifted, but her breath betrayed her. It came shallowly through parted lips. Her pulse beat fast enough that I heard it beneath the music, beneath the building’s ward-hum, beneath the quiet shift of my own control drawing itself tight.

Heat came off her skin in waves.

Sweat. Leather from the chair she had sat in. Blood wine. The faint floral soap from the estate. And beneath all of that, something darker, warmer, unmistakably her. Arousal had a scent. Fear did too. With Grace, both had been ruined by men who deserved to be burned from history, and I would not allow my body to become another interpreter she could not trust.

I braced one hand against the wall near her shoulder. Not touching her. Close enough to feel how easy it would be.

That was the cruelty of it. The distance was only an inch, perhaps less. My fingers rested against old wood, and her shoulder rose and fell beside my wrist. If I turned my hand, I could have touched the soft fabric of her sleeve, the line of her arm, the pulse in her throat that beat with such undisciplined life it made every old thing in me ache.

She had asked to return to the estate. I had read it exactly as I wanted to read it. That was the danger.

Not what she said. Not even the tone, low and rough around the edges after watching a coven leader surrender under stage light and then be tended with reverence. The danger was what my mind did with it before honor could intervene. Estate. Room. Door closing. Privacy. Her breath catching for different reasons. Her hands in my shirt again, not from a nightmare this time. Her mouth at my wrist. Her body over mine.

I held still. Stillness was sometimes the only noble thing left to a man.

Grace looked up at me. The hallway’s warm light cut shadows beneath her cheekbones and turned the dark red of her hair almost black where it fell over one shoulder. She had color in her face now, more than when I had first found her dying outside my club. Life had returned to her by violence and necessity, yes, but it had returned. It stood before me in black satin and guarded eyes, breathing as if breathing were an argument she had not lost.

“You heard me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

The word came out lower than I intended.

Her gaze flicked briefly to my hand against the wall, then back to my face. She did not ask me to move. She did not ask me to stay. The bond between us pulled taut, neither command nor plea, only recognition sharpened by hunger.

“I want to go back,” she said.

“I know.”

Her throat moved. “That demonstration was...”

She stopped. I did not help her. I wanted her words, not the ones I could put in her mouth.

Her palms shifted against the wall, a faint rasp of skin over polished wood. “A lot.”

“Yes.”

Her mouth twitched, but there was no humor in it. “You’re doing that vampire thing again.”

“What thing?”

“Answering with one syllable because you think if you say more, the furniture may catch fire.”

Despite myself, a thin breath of amusement moved through me. “The furniture is old.”