Page 129 of Maksym

The answer came from the doorway.

“Well, I sure as hell hope not.”

Devon walked in as if summoned by despair and offended by its manners.

She wore soft black leggings, an oversized pale sweater slipping off one shoulder, and thick socks that looked wildly inappropriate for a fallen angel living in a vampire king’s mansion. His queen, by all accounts. Her white-blonde hair fell loose and unruly around her face, still slightly damp at the ends. There was nothing arranged about her. Nothing courtly. She crossed straight to the nearest open cushion, dropped onto it with a sigh that belonged to exhausted saints, and women who had had enough of everyone’s existential gloom, then leaned forward and tore a hunk of cheese off the charcuterie board with her fingers.

No plate. No knife.

Lucia’s eyebrows rose.

Devon stuffed the cheese into her mouth, chewed, and pointed at me like we were already in the middle of an argument.

“I mean, mathematically, I have no idea,” she said around the last of it, then swallowed. “But if evil outnumbered good by too much, I think creation would smell worse.”

I stared at her. Doc laughed first.

Lucia closed her eyes briefly as if praying for patience from a source seated in the room eating cheese incorrectly.

Maksym exhaled beside me, and the terrible weight in the room cracked cleanly down the center.

Devon reached for a grape. “Also, good people are often quieter because they are busy cleaning up messes evil people make, while evil people are giving speeches about destiny.”

“That,” I said, “is disturbingly consistent with my professional experience.”

“See?” She popped the grape into her mouth. “I am wise.”

“You are eating from a board prepared by Tilden with your fingers,” Lucia said.

Devon looked at the board.

Then toward the ceiling, as if Tilden might be concealed above us in judgment.

“I love you, Tilden,” she called.

From somewhere beyond the room, a voice answered with perfect composure, “And I you, my queen.”

I nearly choked.

Devon beamed. “He forgives me.”

“He enables you,” Lucia said.

“Same thing with better lighting.”

I laughed. Not fully yet. But enough that my chest remembered how.

Then another presence entered behind Devon.

Taras.

He came in with the same contained precision he carried everywhere, silver hair neat, dark suit unwrinkled despite travel and club operations and whatever burdens came from being the man everyone trusted to make disaster look scheduled. His eyes found Maksym first. A silent exchange passed between them—brief, efficient, unreadable to me beyond the fact that it contained too much information for one glance.

Then Taras moved to me. Not to Maksym. To me.

He stopped a respectful distance away and dipped his head in a precise, unhurried bow.

“My lady.”