"Everything I told you as Lis was true. Everything I felt in your studio was real. This—"
He looked down at his hands. At the blood drying in the creases of his knuckles, darkening from red to brown.
"This is also me. I wish it wasn't. I wish I could be only the version of myself you wanted. But I can't protect you if I'm not willing to do what's necessary."
Ghost had moved.
I noticed it suddenly, the absence of his weight against my legs. My ridiculous, anxious, traumatized dog had crossed the room and was standing beside Maksim. Leaning against his legs. Looking up at him with the same expression he'd worn in my studio, when he'd decided in thirty seconds that this stranger was safe.
Some part of my brain whispered:Ghost knows. Ghost is never wrong about people.
His instincts were better than mine. His judgment was cleaner, unclouded by logic or rationalization or the complicated mess of human emotion.
And Ghost had chosen Maksim.
"I'm scared of you."
The words came out before I could stop them. Raw. Honest. The kind of admission I usually only made in the dark, through a screen, to someone I trusted not to see my face.
Maksim's expression crumpled. Just for a moment. A flash of something devastated before he pulled it back behind the mask.
"I know," he said. His voice was raw. "I'm sorry."
"But I still—"
I couldn't finish the sentence. Couldn't admit the thing underneath the fear, the impossible contradictory thing that had watched him destroy those men and felt protected. That looked at his bloody hands and thought about how gentle they'd been when he caught me in the gallery.
I couldn't admit any of that. Couldn't make sense of it.
So I just stood there. Shaking. Silent. A mess of blood and shock and confusion.
"I'm going to wash up," Maksim said quietly. He was giving me an exit. Giving me space to fall apart without an audience. "There's food in the kitchen, a guest room down the hall. Take whatever you need. I'll be here if you want to talk, and I'll leave you alone if you don't."
He paused at the doorway. His profile was sharp against the city lights beyond the windows—all angles and shadows and the particular beauty of dangerous things.
"I swear on my life, Auralia."
He turned to look at me. Those warm brown eyes, anguished and certain and absolutely sincere.
"I will never hurt you. And I will never let anyone else hurt you either. Whatever else you believe about me—believe that."
Then he was gone. Down the hallway. A door closing somewhere in the depths of the apartment.
And I was standing alone in a stranger's home.
Chapter 8
Maksim
Theshowerhadn'thelped.
I'd scrubbed until my skin went pink, until the water running off my hands stopped carrying that faint rust tinge, until the steam had erased every visible trace of what I'd done on that street. Changed into clean clothes—soft grey henley, worn jeans, the kind of outfit that was supposed to feel normal. Domestic. Human.
But I could still feel the ghost of it on my knuckles. The particular resistance of cartilage. The way a man's weight shifted when he stopped being a man and became just a body.
Some things didn't wash off.
The apartment was dark except for the city glow bleeding through the windows. Manhattan at three in the morning, all those lights belonging to people who were sleeping or fucking or doing anything except sitting on a couch with blood memory on their hands and the woman they loved ten feet away.
