Page 29 of Maksym

I stared at him. His face remained solemn. Dry humor, then. In the middle of this. Of course. Why should the vampire king not have a sense of humor? Why should monsters not be rounded people?

“I can object now,” I said.

“I have noticed.”

For one unbearable second, the silence between us changed texture. Not safe. Not comfortable. Never that. But less like a locked room.

Then Maksym looked at me, really looked, and said quietly, “You are beautiful.”

Everything inside me stopped. Not froze. Stopped.

The fork hovered halfway between my plate and my mouth. I had not even realized I had picked it up. A piece of steak waited on the tines, red at the center, steam faint now but still rising. My hand held there in the space above the plate while the words traveled through me and found every place compliments had been made into weapons.

Beautiful. Lucian had ironically called me pretty when I was weak enough not to fight. Pretty when he dressed me in things that made access easier. Pretty when bruises yellowed at the edges and he liked the contrast. Pretty when he wanted me to know my body had become an object in a room, no more entitled to an opinion than a vase.

My fingers tightened around the fork until the metal bent. Just a little. Enough that both of us saw it. Maksym’s face changed at once. Not alarm for the fork. Not irritation over damaged silver. Regret, sharp and immediate.

“I am sorry,” he said.

I said nothing. The apology hovered uselessly near the blood wine.

I lowered the fork with too much care, straightened it as best I could by pressing it against the edge of the table, and returned the piece of pierced steak to my mouth.

The meat was tender enough to come apart almost before I chewed it. Salt hit first. Then fat. Then the deep mineral richness of rare beef, red and warm and nearly too close to blood. My body seized on it with humiliating focus. Hunger—real hunger, the old human kind, the kind that had lived in my belly for two years—rose behind the newer thirst and reminded me that I had been starved before I had been transformed.

So I ate. I did not savor it. Savoring required leisure, and leisure belonged to people who believed the next meal was likely. I ate the way I had eaten as a child when my grandmother stretched beans and cornbread over too many days and pretended she preferred the heel pieces.

One piece. Chew. Swallow. Another. The steak was already cut into small portions because he had cut it for me. I refused to feel anything about that.

Across from me, Maksym did not speak.

His silence took effort. I could feel that without supernatural assistance. He wanted to do things. That much was obvious. Offer water. Pour more wine. Tell me to slow down. Ask if the meat pleased me. Touch my wrist when my hand trembled.

He did none of it. His hands remained flat on the table. Not reaching. Not taking. Not even offering, which I had begun to understand could be its own pressure when one person held all the power and the other had no shoes, no money, no living family, and a new body built without her consent.

I took another sip of blood wine.

The steak disappeared piece by piece. My stomach should have cramped at the sudden food. It did not. My body absorbed everything with efficient, frightening gratitude. The more I ate, the more present I became, and the more present I became, the harder it was to hide from the facts of the room.

I was clean. I was fed. I was not chained. A vampire king sat across from me and kept his hands where I could see them because I had flinched when he touched me. The next question came out of me because practical terror was safer than grief.

“Do I sleep?”

Maksym’s brows drew together slightly, not with confusion, but as if he had been bracing for another indictment and instead received a procedural inquiry.

I turned the blood wine glass between my fingers. “I mean, do I need to sleep? Can I sleep? Am I going to close my eyes and wake up in a coffin? Or not wake up at all until sunset? I should warn you, the only vampire stories I know involve sparkling, emotional teenagers who never sleep and apparently do not eat anything but deer and unresolved tension. I am aware that is not a rigorous source base.”

Maksym stared at me. Then he laughed.

Not politely. Not the little restrained sound powerful men used when they wanted a woman to know she had amused them, but not enough to disturb their dignity. This was real. Full and startled, pulled from somewhere beneath the crown he could have been wearing, beneath the blood, beneath all that careful stillness. It warmed his face and changed the air around him. The scar on his jaw moved with it. His eyes creased at the corners, which told me he laughed often.

The sound was beautiful. Because apparently the night had not finished insulting me. A laugh escaped me before I could stop it. It was short. Rusted. More surprise than humor. The instant I heard myself, I clapped a hand over my mouth like I had broken a rule. My whole body went tense, waiting for consequence. None came.

Maksym’s laughter softened first, then faded, but something of it remained in his face. He looked younger for half a breath. Not young. There were centuries in him no amount of good lighting could hide. But less carved. Less weaponized.

“I apologize,” he said, though the corner of his mouth had not fully obeyed him. “I was not laughing at you.”

“So you have said.”