Page 49 of Maksym

I swallowed. My throat hurt.

“Is that...” I stopped, started again because cowardice would not serve me. “Is that intimate?”

His gaze held mine. In the darkness, his eyes looked less amber than molten metal banked under ash.

“Yes.”

The answer came without hesitation. I waited for qualification. For euphemism. For some old-world evasion dressed as delicacy. He gave me none.

“It will be the most intimate,” he said. “And you will enjoy it.” His voice lowered, roughened at the edges. “Fuck knows you need something that will feel good to you after so many years of everything feeling like pain.”

The sentence struck a place I had not known was still capable of being struck.

Enjoy it. Feel good.

Those phrases belonged to a language I had not spoken in two years except as evidence of other people’s crimes. My body had been made into a room where others took pleasure and left pain behind as proof they had been there. Pleasure had become suspect by association, a word with fingerprints on its throat.

“I don’t know if I can,” I whispered.

“I know.”

“No, I mean—”

“I know what you mean.” His hand moved once against my back, then stilled as if he had remembered not to presume motion. “We do only what you allow. If you begin and want to stop, you stop. If you do not want this, I will call Millie and we will find another way to get enough blood wine into you.”

Millie. The name steadied me. Then another thing arrived, thin and precise beneath the room’s quiet. A presence outside the door. Not sound exactly. Stillness had a texture now. A contained absence of movement, so deliberate it became its own announcement. I turned my head toward the door.

“Someone’s there.”

“Taras,” Maksym said without looking away from me.

“He’s just standing there?”

“Generally, Taras is wherever I am when there is any possibility of danger.”

“Am I the danger?”

“You are newly turned. Young vampires can be unpredictable.”

The word young made something in me bristle. I had been many things: poor, orphaned, over-educated, underestimated, imprisoned, starving. Young was not something I had felt in a very long time.

Maksym must have read the shift on my face because he added, “Not foolish. Not childish. New. Your strength has arrived before your instincts understand its boundaries.”

“And you think I’ll hurt someone?”

“I think you could hurt someone accidentally.”

“My God.” I laughed once, thin and bitter. “Comforting.”

His expression did not change. “You will not harm your mate.”

The word landed in my chest.

Mate.

I had mocked it. Objected to it. Filed several internal motions against its admissibility. But sitting across his lap with hunger in my throat and his arm a careful line along my back, the word did not land cold.

It landed warm.