Page 64 of Maksym

For a moment after Remington Duval offered me her fealty, no one seemed to know where to put the air.

The room held too much. Too many vows. Too much blood not yet spilled. Too much old power bending itself around a woman who, less than a full day ago by any sane measure of time, had been crawling toward a club door on ruined feet with death already sitting patiently inside her ribs.

Maksym remained before me.

He had lifted his head, but he had not yet risen all the way back into himself. That was the only way I knew how to name it. The king was there, of course. He seemed incapable of misplacing that part completely. But something more dangerous sat beneath the crown now, unguarded and burning, his amber eyes fixed on me as if the laws of the room had changed and he was still deciding whether to obey them or tear them down.

Remy stood a few feet away, her right hand lowered now from her heart. She looked nothing like a woman who had just made a vow that might one day require violence. She looked elegant. Steady. Beautiful in the way knives were beautiful when someone had taken care to polish them.

Taras had moved back from the window, though he had not yet returned to the table. The broken arms of his chair still lay on the polished wood. I could feel him in the room without looking directly at him: the disciplined stillness he wore like armor.

Maksym’s hands rested on his thighs, palms down now. I lifted my hand before I thought better of it.

His cheek was cool beneath my fingers. Not corpse-cold. Not the horrible dead chill I had expected from the stories humans told to frighten one another. Cool like stone shaded from summer sun. Smooth except for the faint pull of the scar along his jaw, the double line I had noticed while he slept and had pretended not to want to study.

His eyes changed when I touched him. Not softened; just stilled.

The mate bond answered in me with humiliating immediacy, a low tug beneath my breastbone, a warmth in the blood that was no longer properly mine.

So I did what I had always done when feeling threatened to become unmanageable. I returned to work.

“We still have business to attend to,” I said.

My voice sounded steadier than I felt. Good. I had built a career on that discrepancy. Maksym watched me for one breath longer.

Then the king returned by degrees. His jaw tightened. His shoulders settled. The terrible exposed thing in his eyes did not vanish, but it moved behind structure, behind discipline, behind all the centuries he had apparently spent making himself into something useful instead of merely lethal.

“Yes,” he said.

He rose slowly, not taking my hand with him, not assuming the touch had granted him anything beyond the moment it occupied. That mattered. Every inch of him seemed to know it mattered.

I let my hand fall back into my lap. Remy laughed.

It was not a delicate laugh. It did not apologize for being loud enough to touch the walls. It rolled through the chamber warm and full and unapologetic, New Orleans curling around the edges of it. The sound should have been inappropriate after everything I had just said. It was not. It broke the room open.

“Lord, cher,” she said, leaning forward with both hands braced lightly on the table. “You just petted the king like he was a large, gloomy dog and told him to get back to work.”

Taras made that same controlled sound from earlier. Judgmental exhale, apparently.

Maksym looked at Remy. Remy looked back at him with open delight.

I blinked once.

Then, against every rational priority, I almost smiled. “He was brooding.”

“He does that,” Taras said.

Maksym did not look at him. “I am in the room.”

“We are aware,” Taras replied. “It is difficult to miss the atmosphere changing whenever you disapprove of being accurately described.”

Remy’s smile widened. Then she turned that warmth on me, and the humor did not leave her face, but the question beneath it sharpened.

“Please, tell me, cher, I must know. How did you escape Lucian?”

There it was. Not pity. Not awe. Not more vows. A question. I straightened in my chair.

My jaw set. My hands stilled in my lap. Across the table, Taras returned to his notebook. Remy waited. Maksym took the seat beside me, close enough that I felt the pull of him, far enough that I could breathe around it.