Page 47 of Maksym

Maksym’s voice entered the darkness without warning. I jerked so hard wine kissed the rim of the glass and nearly spilled over my hand. He had not moved.

His eyes were open now, amber even in the dark, fixed on me with a calm that felt obscene. Not sleepy. Not startled. Awake in the way predators must have always been awake, even after rest: instantly present, instantly aware.

My fingers tightened around the glass.

“I didn’t know you were awake,” I said.

“I woke when your breathing changed.”

Of course, my breathing had become public record.

I set the glass against my thigh, still holding it. “That’s unsettling.”

“Yes,” he said. “I imagine it is.”

His gaze lowered briefly to the glass and came back to my face. “This is likely the first true hunger you have felt since the transition settled into your body. It can feel violent. Your body is not betraying you. It is demanding what it needs.”

That calm, knowing tone cracked something open.

My jaw tightened so sharply my teeth hurt. My free hand curled into a fist against the mattress, nails biting into my palm. He knew. He knew the name of this. He knew the mechanism. He knew why my throat burned, and why the blood wine had felt like relief, and why I wanted to drink until the glass was empty, and maybe then shatter it, because needing anything this badly felt like being owned.

He knew more about my body than I did. Again. It wasn’t fair. None of this was. Everything that I had been had been taken from me by creatures like him. Vampires. Monsters who drank from wrists and throats and called appetite biology when they had the luxury of names. And he knew everything, and I knew nothing.

The glass trembled in my hand. Maksym saw. He did not reach. That made me angrier. I set the glass down. Or meant to.

It struck the nightstand with a sharp crack. Not the glass—the wood. A pale fracture split the polished surface beneath my hand, running crookedly through the dark finish.

I stared at it. Then rage took the rest of me. I shoved to my feet.

“You don’t know everything that you think you know!” I was shouting now—pacing.

“My safety was stripped. My autonomy! My career! My cases!”

I pulled at the robe I wore.

“My apartment, ugly as it had been, I’m sure was emptied. My grandmother’s name on old documents tucked in a drawer somewhere in Phoenix. My ability to walk into a courthouse with a badge clipped to my suit and make dangerous men sit down when I stood to speak.”

My voice had become ragged.

“My choices. My humanity. Every familiar law of flesh and light and hunger. All of it.”

The room moved too quickly. The hunger still burned, dulled, but not gone. My body felt wrong in its readiness. Too light. Too powerful. Like someone had replaced my bones with coiled wire and neglected to include instructions.

“I didn’t ask for this,” I said.

Maksym sat up slowly.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t!” My voice rose. “You keep saying that like knowing is the same as understanding. You don’t understand what it is to wake up and find out your own body has joined the prosecution against you.”

His expression changed at that. I did not care. I turned because I needed to put my hands on something that could bear the weight of what I could not say.

The armoire stood against the wall, carved oak, enormous, old enough to have opinions about the people who touched it. I gripped the edge with both hands. I meant to shake it. Maybe shove it. Maybe hurt my palms against something solid and inanimate because I could not hurt the dead years behind me, and I did not want to hurt the man on the bed.

The armoire lifted off the floor. Not an inch. Not a tremble. It came up.

The whole massive piece rose in my hands as if it had been made of painted cardboard. Its feet left the rug. Something inside slid and thumped against a door. Three hundred pounds of carved oak hung from my hands while my arms barely strained.