Page 233 of Maksym

The blade steadied. My chest tightened.

Pride was too small a word. Fear, too, though not of her. Never of her. Fear for what power cost when it arrived through trauma’s door. Fear that the world would keep demanding she become sharper because it had first refused to let her remain safe. And beneath that, savage wonder.

Lucian’s gaze darted from the blade to Grace.

“What is this?” His voice cracked. “What did you do?”

Grace’s mouth parted slightly. Then, a flick of her wrist.

The blade moved. Fast.

It drove itself between Lucian’s legs with a wet, brutal force that made the chains sing against the wall. The impact buried steel deep, nearly severing his cock from his body. Lucian’s scream tore through the dungeon so violently that Alistaire jerked in his restraints and cried out with him, as if pain had crossed the few feet between them and demanded company.

Blood ran dark down Lucian’s thighs.

His body convulsed against the shackles. The runes flared at his wrists and ankles, punishing the old instinct to break free. He screamed again, higher this time, stripped of accent, title, legacy, and every elegant cruelty he had ever mistaken for strength.

Grace stared at him. Then she laughed. Full and bright.

The sound struck the dungeon like a window breaking open in a tomb.

She turned back to us, eyes shining, face alive with a wildness that had nothing to do with madness and everything to do with discovery.

“Ha! Would you look at that? Not bad for my first time, huh?”

For half a second, no one answered.

Then Bohdan, blessed degenerate that he was, found his voice first.

“Well,” he said, delighted and crass as sin, “if that was your first time, remind me never to critique your technique.”

Taras made a sound that could best be described as a laugh strangled by rage and awe in equal measure.

My father lifted an eyebrow.

“Well done, Gracelyn.”

I crossed to Grace before thought could dress the movement in protocol. My hands took her face, thumbs along the fine bones of her cheeks, fingers sliding into the hair behind her ears. She looked up at me, laughter still caught at the edge of her mouth, power still bright in her eyes, and some ruined place inside me laid itself at her feet without regret.

I kissed her.

Not gently enough for a dungeon. Not carefully enough for witnesses. I kissed her with the violence I had denied myself since the Council chamber, with the pride I had no language for, with the terrible tenderness of a man who had just watched his mate discover another way to survive the thing that tried to end her.

She kissed me back.

For one moment, Lucian’s screams became background. Stone, chains, blood, torchlight—none of it vanished. Grace did not need the world softened for her victory to count. She only needed to be met inside it.

I pulled back just far enough to speak against her mouth.

“My fucking queen.”

Her smile returned slowly.

Dangerously.

I released her only because there was one more thing I had promised myself I would give her.

The table waited along the wall, blades glittering in their patient line. I crossed to it while Lucian sobbed and cursed in fragments behind me, his body twitching against the chains, his voice ruined by pain and disbelief. I ignored him. He had become noise again, but no longer consequential noise.