Page 21 of Maksym

“I crawled out,” she said, breath ragged now. “I crawled out of whatever hell he kept me in, and I came here because I heard there was a king. I thought—God help me—I thought maybe the monster with a crown would be better than the monster who owned me.”

My vision narrowed. Not at her. Never at her. At the word owned.

A shadow moved along the far wall, thin as smoke beneath the lamps. I pulled it back. The room did not need my rage. Grace certainly did not.

“I will make it my life’s mission,” I said, “to destroy every person responsible for every pain you have felt from the day you fell into their hands.”

She stared at me, chest rising and falling too fast. My voice remained quiet.

“I will find them. I will strip them of protection, title, wealth, bloodline, and heartbeat. If they had a hand in what was done to you, they will answer to me.”

Her eyes shone, but not softly.

I leaned forward by one inch and no more. “But you will not equate what I did for you with what they did to you.”

Her face closed.

“No?”

“No.” The word was colder than I intended, so I softened the next. “You were moments from death.”

“I felt you.” Her voice dropped then, and somehow that was worse than shouting. “When you made me swallow.”

I did not look away.

Her lips trembled around the next breath, but she held my gaze. “I felt it. Like my body wasn’t mine. Like something pushed inside my head and told me what to do.”

The old instincts rose with all their useless defenses. I could explain that compulsion was not so simple. I could say it was not possession, not violation in the way her captor’s creatures had violated. I could say I used the smallest amount necessary. I could say I would have burned my own tongue out before using it on her for any selfish purpose.

All of that would still have left the central fact intact.

“Yes,” I said. “I compelled you.”

Her nostrils flared.

“I will not deny it,” I continued. “You had to swallow my blood. If you had not, your body would have rejected the transition in a way that would have caused more pain than you could survive.”

Her laugh was small and terrible. “Convenient.”

“It is the truth.”

“That doesn’t make it consent.”

“No, it does not.”

The admission stopped her for the length of a heartbeat.

I set my hands flat on the table as she had done, though I kept distance between us. “It was not consent as you understand it. It was triage.”

Her eyes sharpened. There she was.

Not only the wounded woman. Not only the new vampire. Something else moved behind the terror, clean-edged and lethal. Her mind seized the word triage like evidence mishandled by opposing counsel.

“Triage,” she repeated.

“Yes.”

“You decided the emergency permitted you to override my autonomy.”