Page 9 of Maksym

I did not know if I had said it. I did not think I had breath enough.

A face lowered into the blur above me. Amber eyes. Dark lashes. A mouth stained red. Fangs.

“Swallow.”

It was not only a word. It entered me.

That was the only way I knew how to understand it. His command moved through my eyes, my throat, the muscles under my jaw. It did not ask permission. It did not persuade. It took the part of me that still belonged to me and stepped over it as if it were nothing but a coat dropped on the floor.

My throat worked. I swallowed.

Horror arrived late, slow as winter. Not because blood was in my mouth. Not because a vampire leaned over me. But because my body had obeyed him while I was still inside it, saying no.

Tears burned, but I had no water left for them.

“Swallow.”

Again. My throat moved again.

Something in me cracked, not bone, not exactly mind, but the small legal fiction I had clung to in the dark: that even if they owned the room, the locks, the feeding schedule, the light, the food, the pain, they did not own the private machinery of my will.

This one did.

I hated him for that before I knew anything else about him.

Then the taste changed.

It did not stop being blood. It became more blood than blood had any right to be. The copper opened. Beneath it came warmth, not heat, not fever, but something deep and mineral, something older than hunger. It rolled over my tongue and down my throat, and my body, traitorous starving thing, recognized it as salvation before I did.

Warmth spread outward from the first swallow.

My throat lit. My chest. The hollows under my ribs. My fingertips.

The backs of my knees, where scars I had tried not to think about began to prickle and burn. My wrists pulsed. My teeth ached. My spine arched a fraction off the bed, not from pleasure, not from pain, but from the shock of being inhabited again.

I smelled snow.

That made no sense. There was blood in my mouth, sheets beneath me, a vampire over me, and somehow I smelled mountain air so cold it had never learned mercy. Clean stone. Dark pine. A winter sky with no city under it. Beneath that was something else I had no name for, something that made my ruined body strain toward the wrist pressed to my lips.

My hands lifted.

They looked like someone else’s hands. Cracked knuckles. Broken nails. Blue veins under skin too thin. The wrist began to leave me, or I feared it would, and panic sharpened into need so pure it erased shame. I caught him with both hands.

His skin was cool. His blood was not.

I pulled his wrist closer with strength I did not have.

A sound came from above me. Not protest. Not quite. I did not care. I sealed my mouth over the wound and drank.

The world, which had been leaving, came back violently.

Cell by cell. Nerve by nerve.

Not gently. Resurrection was not gentle. It hurt worse than dying because dying had finally grown quiet, and this was noise made flesh. My heart gave a hard, ugly knock that shook my chest. Then another. My lungs seized. My stomach cramped. Bones that had become little more than scaffolding beneath skin remembered their depth. Hunger yawned open inside me, black and enormous.

I drank harder. The wrist at my mouth became the only true thing in creation.

My body woke with the blind greed of a house fire. It dragged his blood into itself and demanded more. More, because my veins were empty. More, because I had been so cold for so long. More, because if I stopped, the dark might come back, and some primitive thing underneath Gracelyn Marlow, JD, federal prosecutor, survivor, fool, would have burned the world to keep that from happening.