Page 124 of Maksym

I respected him deeply.

Maksym guided me toward one of the sofas but did not press me into sitting. Lucia took the chair opposite before anyone else had settled, which told me immediately she considered waiting for the entire room to assemble an inefficient use of time. Doc sat beside her on the arm of the chair rather than in a separate seat, one hand resting along the back near her shoulder. It should have looked casual. It did not. It looked like two people who had survived enough violence together that proximity had become a second language.

Maksym sat beside me only after I did.

Lucia reached for a glass of blood wine, poured with a steady hand, and offered it to me before pouring her own.

The glass was warm. I held it in both hands and let the heat settle against my palms.

“Father and Devon will be down soon,” Lucia said. “Devon wanted to change. Father attempted to convince her that changing was unnecessary. This made changing take longer.”

Doc’s mouth twitched. “That is a charitable version.”

“It is accurate.”

“It leaves out the part where your daddy looked at her like she’d declared war on buttons.”

Lucia looked at him.

Doc lifted both hands. “I am a doctor. Observation is part of the job.”

Maksym made a quiet sound beside me. “You become bold in Philadelphia.”

“I married into this family,” Doc said. “Bold was medically indicated.”

I sipped the blood wine to hide my smile.

The wine was rich and warm, less fortified than the one at Obsidian, or maybe simply less intent on making a spectacle of itself. It slid over my tongue with dark fruit and iron and something spiced beneath. My body responded with humiliating gratitude. Not ravenous. Not desperate. Just a soft internal yes that made me want to argue with my own nervous system.

Lucia’s eyes returned to me. The room shifted. Not visibly, perhaps. But the air tightened around purpose.

“How were you captured?” she asked.

No preamble.

No soft voice. No careful tilt of the head designed to feign compassion while extracting information.

Maksym went still beside me.

Doc looked down at Lucia with the expression of a man who had known this was coming and had failed to stop it because he loved someone impossible.

My fingers tightened around the warm glass.

Lucia did not look away. “And how long were you held?”

There it was.

The room did not become cruel. That mattered. No one leaned forward with hunger. No one took my pain and turned it into entertainment. But the question still struck bone.

Maksym’s hand moved on the cushion between us. He did not touch me. Available.

I could have chosen not to answer. I knew that. He had taught me already, in ways both spoken and not, that choice had to be repeated until the body believed it.

I set the glass on the table. Then I looked at Lucia.

“Do you ease into anything?”

“No,” she said.