Page 179 of Maksym

Lucia pushed it toward me again. “Take another swallow.”

I obeyed.

“Better,” she said.

The voices from the main chamber came muffled through the walls behind us, an indistinct churn of politics and speculation.

I drew in one breath. Then another.

“I’ll be two minutes,” I said.

Maksym’s gaze returned to me.

“Take three.”

I nodded once and walked toward the ladies’ room.

The ladies’ room was too quiet in the way institutional rooms often were, all pale stone and polished metal pretending no one ever came inside to fall apart.

I turned on the cold water. Then I leaned down and splashed my face.

Cold struck skin. My eyes closed. The blood wine Lucia had forced on me moved warmly beneath my ribs, steadying the strange new machinery of my body. When I lifted my head, the mirror gave me back a woman in formal black, pale and sharp-eyed, mouth set, dampness clinging along her hairline.

I did not look broken. That mattered less than I wanted it to and more than I should have allowed.

I dried my hands. Repacked nothing because nothing had been unpacked. Took one breath for the room. One for myself. One for Maddie, who would soon have to tell the Council what had been done to her.

Then I opened the door. The smell hit me first. Sickly sweet cologne over old blood and expensive wool. My body knew before my mind did.

I had one fractured instant of recognition, and then my back struck the marble wall hard enough to knock air from lungs that no longer needed it in quite the same way but still remembered panic. A hand clamped onto my shoulder. A body blocked the doorway. Long blond hair. Cruel mouth. Pale eyes arranged into ownership.

Lucian Devereaux leaned in as if the hallway belonged to him because I had once been trapped in a room where he decided everything.

For a second, I was not in Chicago. I was in a bed.

Wrists bound. Mouth dry. Body too weak to fight gravity, much less him. A chair beside me. His legs crossed. His voice making cruelty sound refined. Days counted not by sunrise but by whether he entered smiling.

My chest tightened so violently that the corridor narrowed. There it was. Fear.

Old, efficient, well-trained fear. It rose with muscle memory, with starvation memory, with every helpless hour when he had reduced me to what he could use and called that reduction natural.

His hand tightened.

“Look at you,” he murmured.

His British accent curled around each word like rot under silk. I tried to move my shoulder. He pressed me harder against the wall.

“You think you’re special. Look at how I trained you to be another man’s toy.”

The sentence slid into me, looking for the places he had carved.

“You stand in there dressed in law, and they all pretend you are something remade. But I remember what you were.” His face dipped closer to my neck. “What you are. Hungry. Obedient when properly handled. So desperate for survival that you would take any hand offered, even his.”

My throat went cold. Not because I believed him. Because part of me knew the language. Trauma did not ask permission before translating.

“You did not escape me,” he whispered. “You merely changed cages. Kozlov blood. Kozlov bed. Kozlov leash. Tell me, Gracelyn, did he praise you for being brave before or after he made you useful?”

My breathing slowed. It should have quickened. That was what he wanted. Panic. Tears. Trembling. The old economy of his power required my body to pay him in visible fear. But beneath the fear, something else opened its eyes. Maksym’s blood moved in me.