Page 15 of Maksym

After a while, when my breathing had become less jagged, she spoke.

“His Majesty turned you.”

The words landed in the water between us. I stared at the gold drain near my feet.

Turned.

I knew the word. Of course I knew it. I had heard vampires use it the way wealthy people discussed buying property. Rarely. Carefully. Sometimes with disdain. Humans were food, entertainment, leverage. Turning one required purpose. Permission. Power. Lucian had once told me he would never turn me because eternity would give me too many opportunities to become inconvenient.

My hand moved to my throat. Millie watched me.

“You were dying,” she said. “I do not say that to excuse everything. I say it because it is true. Your body could not have survived what had been done to it much longer. Minutes, perhaps. Not hours.”

“I’m not human,” I said.

My voice sounded small in the marble room.

“No,” Millie said. “Not anymore.”

I waited for the scream to come. It did not.

Something worse came instead: a cold, flat space where the scream should have been. My body knew the truth even while my mind stood back from it in horror.

He had made me one of them. The thing I hated. The thing that had fed from me until there was almost nothing left to feed from. My fingers curled under the water.

“I didn’t want this.”

“I know.”

The answer was immediate. I looked at her then. Millie’s face held no argument. No defense of him. No offended loyalty demanding gratitude from me like a tax.

“I don’t know what you said to him,” she continued. “I do not know what choices were possible in the seconds he had. Those are matters he must answer for himself. But you are allowed to hate this. You are allowed to grieve what was taken. Being saved does not mean you have to be grateful for the shape of the rescue.”

That sentence moved through me slowly.

Being saved does not mean you have to be grateful for the shape of the rescue.

“All vampires are monsters,” I whispered.

The words came out more exhausted than fierce. Millie dipped a cloth in the water and wrung it out.

“You have every reason to believe that.”

I looked at her sharply. She washed my shoulder with careful strokes, avoiding the worst bites except to let water pass over them.

“I will not tell you that what you know is false,” she said. “You know what was done to you. You know the ones who did it. If someone tried to talk me out of my own suffering, I would bite them, and I am considered very polite.”

Despite everything, a broken breath left me. Almost a laugh. Not quite. Millie’s mouth curved faintly, then softened again.

“But no,” she said. “It is not true of all of us.”

All of us. I went still. She looked at me directly.

“I am a vampire, Grace.”

My hand tightened on the side of the tub.

I should have known. The warmth of her hands had fooled me, or I had let it. The scent of blood beneath lavender. The way Maksym obeyed her. The fact that she moved through this hidden palace as if age and death had both become matters she had settled long ago.