Close to dawn, Maximus finds me in the corridor outside the east wing. He doesn’t say anything. Just takes my hand and walks me to our room.
We undress in silence for a moment. Then I say it.
“Did you see Konstantin’s vampire, Alexei?”
“I spent three hours with him in the secure wing.” He folds his shirt over the back of the chair. “He’s calm. Cooperative. Gave us locations on two farms without being asked twice. Everything about him reads as genuine.”
“Simone remembers him.” I sit on the edge of the bed. “She gave me his name before Julian did. He was the one guard who brought her blood when the others forgot.”
“Julian told me,” he says.
So he’s known for hours. He’s been sitting with this all night.
“Alexei didn’t mention your sister,” he says. “Not once. Three hours of cooperating on everything else, and he never said her name.” He pulls back the sheets. “I need you in the room when I go back.”
“He asked for me by name, Maximus. I was always going to be in the room.”
We get into bed. The mattress gives where the Lithenmere’s stone held. Cotton sheets instead of fabric that rippled under my fingers.
“It still feels like we were on vacation while the house burned down,” I say.
“We brought back the alliance. The Fae military support. The intelligence Lanthar is sharing through Seraphina.”
“I know. But the healing springs were a little bit of a vacation.”
His thumb traces my knuckles. One pass. Slow.
I press my back against his chest. His arm comes around me.
The compound goes quiet around us. The way it does every dawn. Footsteps stopping. Doors closing. The building settling into the stillness that usually takes everyone but me.
The shutters close. All at once, the compound locking the sun out.
He’s still awake. No pull. No fight. Just awake, the way he was in Thessivane.
He sits up. Pulls the covers back. Crosses the room.
His hand finds the manual override beside the window frame. A switch no vampire should ever touch during daylight, because touching it means dying.
He opens the shutters.
Dawn floods the room. All of it at once. Full Georgia morning, the sun already above the tree line, gold light hitting the floor and the bed and the man standing at the window with his hand still on the switch.
He stands in it. The sun on his face, his chest, his hands. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t burn.
He turns to me. Gold light behind him.
I go to him. He pulls me in. The light falls across both of us now.
Around us, every vampire is dormant. Every room still. Just the two of us awake, holding each other in the sun.
All of it waits. The war. The prisoner. The Hidden Accords cracking at the edges.
For right now, this is enough.
Chapter
Seventeen
