Page 234 of Maksym

My hand passed over knives made for punishment, instruments too crude or too intimate for what came next. Then I closed my fingers around the hilt of the blade I had commissioned before the Council ever voted, before remand, before the public machinery of law finished turning.

A small sword.

Beautiful. Balanced. Custom-made for Grace’s hands.

At the pommel, barely visible unless one knew to look, a small mark had been etched.

Not my crest. Hers. A crown above a blade. I carried it back to her with both hands.

Lucian’s breath hitched when he saw it. Even through pain, he understood enough. Some instincts persisted until the end.

Grace looked from the sword to me.

For the first time since entering the dungeon, something softer moved across her face. Not uncertainty. Not gratitude exactly. Recognition, perhaps, of being seen not only as a survivor, not only as a witness, not only as my mate, but as the hand that would close the record.

“I had this forged especially for you,” I said, my voice low enough that the dungeon seemed to quiet around it. “In case you wanted to end him quickly.”

I turned the hilt toward her.

“Take his head.”

Grace reached for the sword.

She held the sword in both hands and looked at him.

Then she said, “I think I’d like that very much.”

Chapter 27

Grace

The water had been hot enough to turn the marble walls silver with steam, and still I could smell the dungeon when I closed my eyes.

Not truly. I knew that. I had rinsed until my skin flushed and then cooled, until soap ran in clean ribbons down the drain, until the last trace of blood and stone and old iron had been drowned beneath lavender conditioner and the mineral bite of the west wing’s endless hot water. The scent was memory, not matter. That distinction did not make it gentler.

The shower was larger than the entire bathroom in the apartment I had once rented in Phoenix. Multiple sprays struck from the walls and ceiling, warm hands made of water moving over my shoulders, my back, my breasts, the soft curve of my stomach.

Soft.

That word still startled me.

For so long, my body had been a ledger of subtraction. Ribs. Hip bones. Wrists too delicate beneath skin. Thighs with no strength left except the mean, animal kind that kept a person standing when standing no longer served any purpose but defiance. Now the water moved over restored flesh. Fullness. Weight. Strength. My curves had returned not as the body I remembered exactly, but as something rebuilt by blood and immortality and a mate bond I had held at a distance because I had not known what would happen if I stopped bracing against it.

Faint traces of old scars remained here and there, pale under healed skin, visible only when steam gathered and the light struck wrong. They were not Lucian’s property anymore. They were not evidence tonight. They were simply marks on a body that had survived long enough to become mine again.

I rinsed the last of the conditioner from my hair and tipped my head back, letting water run over my face.

For one brief second, there was nothing but heat and the steady sound of falling water.

Then I opened my eyes. Maksym stood in the bathroom doorway.

The steam blurred the edges of him, but nothing could soften the fact of his presence. He filled the frame, wearing only black boxer briefs, his dark hair damp at the ends as if he had run his hands through it too many times. His shoulders were broad; his body all controlled power and restraint. The double scar along his jaw caught the low light.

His amber eyes were fixed on me. Glassy. Not with hunger. Not only that. The look on his face undid me before he spoke.

“I only wanted to check on you,” he said.

His voice was low, rougher than usual, the European edges more apparent in the quiet. He did not step farther in. He did not let his gaze become a claim. He stood there as if the line between tile and threshold mattered because I mattered, because after everything, even a husband in all but ceremony, a mate by Goddess law, a king whose blood had remade me, understood that entrance was not entitlement.