Page 60 of Maksym

“My unit. My supervisor. Some agency partners. I had not opened a formal indictment path yet. I was still building predication. Quietly, or I thought quietly.”

She looked into her coffee.

“Lucian got wind of it.”

No one spoke.

I saw it then—not in detail, but in the slight alteration of her face. The distance she forced between herself and the next set of words. A courtroom distance. The kind that allowed a person to describe blood on walls without becoming the person who had touched it.

“I was ambushed in a parking garage,” Grace said.

My fangs ached.

I did not move.

“I had worked late. That was normal. I was carrying a laptop bag and a case file box. I remember being irritated because one of the elevators was out again, and I had heels on because I’d been in court earlier. There were two men. Human, I think. Compelled, maybe. I didn’t know about compulsion then.”

Her voice remained flat.

“One approached from behind a concrete pillar. The other came from the stairwell. I reached for my phone. I was struck before I could unlock it. Not enough to incapacitate me. Enough to disorient. They knew what they were doing.”

Taras’s pen had stopped.

Remy’s eyes had gone amber-gold again, but dimly, banked fire.

“They put something over my mouth. Chemical. I fought. I remember biting someone’s hand. I remember my knee connecting with something. I remember thinking that if I could just make enough noise, someone would come.”

She looked up then. Her eyes found mine.

“No one came.”

The sentence held no accusation toward me. That did not spare me.

I had no jurisdiction over that garage then. No knowledge of her existence. No way to have known. None of that mattered to the old brutal arithmetic inside me that insisted what had happened to my mate was a failure of the world I ruled and the bloodline I bore.

Grace looked away first.

“When I woke, Lucian was there.”

The name seemed to lower the temperature of the room.

“He was pleased,” she said. “That was the first thing I understood. Not angry. Not rushed. Pleased.”

Her voice remained clipped, but the fingers around the mug had gone white.

“He told me I had become irritating. Not dangerous yet, he said. Irritating. Like a clever insect near his ear. He said killing me would have been easy, but easy things lacked artistry.”

A tremor crossed her mouth. She controlled it.

“He said it was a great joke to take me instead. A federal prosecutor who hunted traffickers, made into property. He liked that part. He repeated it often.”

The mug cracked. Not fully. A thin line appeared near Grace’s thumb and raced down toward the base. She stared at it. I reached very slowly for the spare cup Millie had left on the tray and placed it near her without touching her hands. Grace transferred the coffee with careful precision. A small spill darkened the polished table. No one commented. She resumed as though a court reporter had asked her to continue.

“I don’t know where I was held.”

Taras’s head lifted.

Grace noticed. “Not at first. Not clearly. I was moved. More than once, I think. Sedated sometimes. Blindfolded sometimes. There were rooms with no windows. Concrete under rugs. Expensive sheets over mattresses bolted to frames. Wards, though I didn’t know that word. Places that felt... wrong.”