Page 48 of Maksym

I stopped. Maksym stood. Not fast. Not with the blur I had seen vampires use when they wanted to frighten. He rose from the bed carefully, hands visible at his sides.

My grip tightened on the armoire. A door creaked.

“I could throw it,” I whispered.

“Yes,” he said.

I turned my head toward him. He was not looking at the armoire as if it mattered. He was looking at me. And there it was—the thing that stopped me.

Not fear of me. Not calculation about his own safety. No offended royal pride at furniture being threatened in his palace. His face held something much closer to terror, but not for himself. For me. His amber eyes tracked every line of my body the way a person watched someone standing at the edge of a roof, one wrong move from falling.

The rage did not vanish. It lost its shape. My arms began to shake. Not from weight. From everything else. I lowered the armoire. It hit the floor too hard. The impact shuddered through the rug, the boards, the soles of my feet. Somewhere inside it, something small toppled over with a muffled sound.

Then my legs gave.

I slid down the wall beside it, robe gathered in my fists, knees pulling up toward my chest. The sobs came before I could decide whether to permit them. Hard. Ugly. Animal. They tore out of me without rhythm or dignity, wrenching my shoulders forward until my forehead nearly touched my knees.

I had cried in the bath. That had been grief with manners, compared to this. This was not crying. This was collapse.

“I don’t know how to do this,” I said, or tried to say. The words broke apart. “I don’t know how to be this.”

The room answered first with silence. I lifted my head enough to see Maksym cross the room toward me.

He did not walk like a king then. Not like a man accustomed to rooms making way for him. He approached the way a person approached a cornered animal with teeth and a history of traps. Slow. Low. Hands visible. No sudden angles. No demand in his body except the terrible patience of someone willing to stop at any moment.

I hated it. I hated that I was the thing being approached that way. Hated that my fear had become visible enough to instruct him. Hated that carefulness could feel like kindness and humiliation at the same time.

He stopped several feet away and lowered himself to one knee. He stayed where he was.

In the dark, with my new eyes and my old grief, I saw too much. The faint crease between his brows. The tension he held in his shoulders, as if remaining still required more effort than violence would have. The way one hand rested open on his thigh, palm up, useless unless I chose to make it otherwise.

Every single thing he had done since I collapsed outside Amethyst had been an attempt to help me. The thought came slowly, unwelcome and solid. He was not Lucian. He was not any of them.

My throat tightened around a different kind of terror. Need. I looked up at him through wet lashes.

“Can you please help me?”

Maksym’s face changed. No triumph. No satisfaction. No trace of I told you so. Only tenderness, grave and devastating, as if I had handed him something breakable, and he understood there would be no replacing it if he mishandled the weight.

“Yes, my love,” he said softly. “I want nothing more than to help you.”

He did not move at first. That was the first mercy of my asking: he let the question remain mine for one breath longer before he answered it with his body.

Then Maksym rose from his knee slowly, still watching my face for refusal. When he bent toward me, his arms came into view before the rest of him did, broad hands open, palms turned slightly upward.

He gathered me from the floor as if I weighed nothing, but he did not clutch. One arm slid behind my back. The other went beneath my knees. My robe stayed closed because I held it there with both fists, and he gave no sign he noticed anything beyond the fact that I was shaking hard enough to make my teeth chatter.

His chest was solid against my shoulder. Cool through his shirt. Real.

He carried me back to the bed and sat against the headboard with me sideways across his lap, not laying me down, not looming over me. My legs draped over his thighs. One of his arms wrapped around my back, firm enough to keep me from sliding, loose enough that I could have pushed away. The torn sheet had been shoved aside. The bed smelled like sleep and silk and him.

My tears had not stopped. They had only quieted into something wet and humiliating along my cheeks.

“I am going to feed you from my vein,” he said.

My body heard that before my mind did. The burn in my throat flared. My mouth filled with want so sharp it made my stomach twist.

Maksym’s arm tightened by a fraction, not restraint. Warning, maybe. Or comfort. “It is the most effective way to get true nourishment into you quickly. Blood wine helps. Mine will help more.”