Page 218 of Maksym

Lucian stood fully now. The guards nearest him stepped closer. He noticed.

His eyes darted toward Alastair Crowe, who still sat frozen across the chamber, face drained, mouth open enough to make him look foolish rather than dangerous. Their gazes met for one brief, damning instant.

Then Alastair looked away. Ah. There you are, I thought.

Grace did not turn to watch either of them. She knew the room would do that for her.

“The Council should be advised,” she said, “that what you are about to see was not obtained from rumor, conjecture, or coerced testimony. It was gathered through investigation conducted after my recovery and corroborated through multiple sources. Locations remain under active containment, and rescue operations are being prepared or executed as this Council sits.”

Prepared or executed. I looked at Lucia again. Her expression remained still. My sister had not merely found evidence. She had moved pieces.

Pride rose in me, dark and sharp. Lucia had always been the blade our enemies noticed only after it had entered. Whatever distance lay between Philadelphia, Iron Valor, and the rest of us, she remained Kozlov down to the marrow.

The lights in the chamber dimmed. Not fully. Just enough. Lucian’s breathing grew audible. Only to vampire ears, perhaps. Perhaps not.

Grace stood before the dimming chamber, neither hiding from the screen nor centering herself in front of it. She had no interest in blocking the evidence with her own body. She had been a body used against her will for two years. Now she stepped aside and let what had been done speak where every throne could hear.

My mate. My queen, whether the world had yet learned to use the word or not.

The first frame flickered onto the screen.

The entire Council froze in their seats, staring at what Lucia’s team had found.

Chapter 25

Grace

The first image did not scream.

That was almost worse.

It arrived in clean color and perfect focus, a private office rendered with the indifferent fidelity of a camera that had never learned shame. Polished desk. Dark leather chairs. A wall of books selected by a man who wanted visitors to think him civilized before they learned what civilization had permitted him to hide.

Lucian Devereaux sat in one chair with one ankle crossed over his knee, long blond hair neat at the nape of his neck, a crystal glass balanced in one elegant hand. Alastair Crowe sat across from him, angled toward the desk with the practiced ease of a man who had entered too many rooms believing the door would always open for him again.

My body knew that office.

Not because I had spent long hours there. I had not. Lucian had not brought me into rooms where numbers were discussed unless the numbers concerned my usefulness. But I knew the carpet. I knew the edge of that desk. I knew the arrangement of authority in that room; the way Lucian positioned himself so that anyone across from him had to look up slightly when he leaned forward.

Memory did not enter me gently. It came with the scent of old wool and copper and that sickly sweet cologne I had smelled outside the ladies’ room. My throat tried to close around air I no longer needed in the same way. I kept my chin level.

The recording had a timestamp in the corner.

Lucian’s voice filled the Council chamber, smooth and amused.

“You worry too much, Crowe.”

On the screen, Alastair shifted in his seat. His fingers tapped once against the armrest. “Humans leave records. Families. Bank accounts. Phones. Jobs. You can misplace one or two. Not dozens.”

“Dozens?” Lucian laughed softly. “How provincial. We are not snatching milkmaids from village roads. We are selecting from margins no one investigates properly. Runaways. Addicts. The indebted. Migrants with no papers. People already half-erased by their own systems.”

Several creatures in the gallery moved at once.

Not loudly. A rustle of robes. A breath. A claw against wood. The first involuntary sound of powerful beings hearing cruelty described not as passion, but policy.

Alastair’s face tightened on the screen. “One of them was not erased.”

Lucian’s smile sharpened.