Page 13 of Maksym

My throat worked. “Gracelyn Marlow.”

My full name sounded strange in that room. Too human. Too legal. Like a signature at the bottom of a document everyone else had already torn up. But Millie repeated it softly.

“Gracelyn Marlow.” She said it as if it mattered.

I had thought I was out of tears. I was wrong. The first one slipped hot down my cheek and into the corner of my mouth, where it met the lingering taste of blood.

Millie did not wipe it away. That mercy nearly broke me.

She spoke to me a little about my fear being completely normal and justified. Miraculously, she had calmed me. Then, she turned her head, and the softness did not leave her face, but it changed direction.

“Majesty,” she called quietly.

Maksym straightened as if he were the one about to be corrected.

“You will wait in this room.”

Taras made a small sound that could have been breath or astonishment. I glanced at Maksym because I could not help it. A king, I remembered dimly. They had said king. Lucian had cursed that title. The vampire before me had bitten me. Commanded me. Filled me with blood that had made death retreat.

Millie spoke to him as if he were a boy with muddy boots.

His amber eyes remained on me for one unbearable second. Then he looked at her.

“Millie—”

“No.” Her voice did not sharpen. It did not have to. “You will wait.”

Something passed between them that I did not understand. A history too long for the room to hold. His expression went very still, but the stillness was different from before. Less predator. More a man swallowing words he was desperate to speak.

At last, he gave one clipped nod.

Millie turned back to me as if kings obeying her were routine.

“Come, dear,” she said. “Let us get you clean.”

The word clean should not have hurt. It did. I looked down at myself and saw too much. The torn places. The dirt. The blood.

Millie helped me stand.

My legs trembled. Maksym moved without moving, some instinctive forward shift that stopped the instant Millie glanced at him.

“Stay,” she told him. He stayed.

The adjoining bathroom was larger than the bedroom where Lucian had kept me.

There was an enormous soaking tub deep enough to drown a memory. Gold fixtures polished to a warm gleam. A glass-walled shower off to one side. Towels folded in thick white stacks. A mirror that caught my reflection before I was ready.

I looked away too late. For one second, I saw myself.

Not the courtroom version. Not the girl on my grandmother’s porch. Not even the prisoner I had learned not to study when they dragged me past reflective glass. This was worse because she was almost alive again. Hollow cheeks. Eyes too large. Lips stained dark. A throat marked by layer upon layer of bites, one fresh place already sealed cleaner than the rest. Hair hanging in ropes. Shoulders sharp. A woman scraped down to the last possible outline.

I turned my face from the mirror. Millie noticed and said nothing.

She lowered the lid of the toilet and guided me to sit. I obeyed because standing had become complicated.

Water thundered into the tub. I flinched. Millie adjusted the flow lower without comment.

Steam rose. She opened a jar and tipped bath salts into the water. The scent that bloomed was mild and clean, not perfumed enough to choke. Her hands moved with brisk competence.