Chapter 1 Nadia #3
That made me grin. "I'm going to be a problem with most things," I said pleasantly. "The schedule's just first."
He took the map back and returned it to his pocket. "Then I'll make new ones."
"How many copies did you bring?"
His gaze found mine, level and unhurried. "Enough," he said, in exactly the tone and cadence I'd used about the riding and turned back to the horse.
My pulse did the thing again.
I told it to stop immediately.
Oh, said something deeply unhelpful in the back of my mind. This is going to be an issue.
I filed that under “Future Nadia's problem” and moved on.
Dawn came up gray and reluctant over the Divide, the kind of morning that seemed like it would rather have stayed in bed.
The surface shadows thinned, retreating to corners and doorways.
I felt the shift the way I always felt it—automatic, constant, the ongoing low-level awareness of every shadow within range that had been part of me since before I could remember being anything else.
I didn't reach for the deep. There was no point.
I took him in instead—centuries of rigid discipline and sharp edges, standing in a Divide courtyard in the thin gray light with perfect posture, completely prepared for a weeks-long journey he hadn't asked for, with a shadow Fae he didn't trust.
I thought about what Kieran had said as I was walking out the Lock & Key's door. The particular cruelty of a man who loved his big brother and had just been handed the perfect weapon to dick with him.
"Try calling him Enzo. He hates it."
Something settled in my chest. The particular loosening of a person who had identified the only manageable thing in an otherwise unmanageable situation.
"All right, Enzo," I said. "Let's get a move on."
He went completely still.
Vampires didn't startle. Lorenzo simply became very calm in the way dangerous men did when they were deciding exactly how much of a problem something was about to become.
"Don't."
Low. Quiet. Absolute. The kind of voice that had probably stopped soldiers mid-charge and made them reconsider their life choices. The kind of voice that came from a jaw like that and eyes like those and centuries of being the most dangerous thing in any given room.
Something entirely traitorous happened in my chest. And my belly. And other places I was refusing to think about.
I told my body to mind its own business.
"Don't what?" I asked, the picture of innocence, already reaching for Sugar's saddle.
Then that damn horse bit me.
It wasn’t hard enough to break skin, but she'd made her point and considered it made. My hand flew off the saddle, and I found her already facing forward with the serene expression of an animal who had absolutely no idea why I was delaying our departure.
"She does that," he said. "To strangers."
"Charming animal." I reached for the saddle again, more carefully this time. "Really. A treasure."
"She is, actually." No irony, just fact. "Best horse I've had in a hundred and forty years."
Sugar fixed her gaze on the road with the thousand-yard stare of a warhorse who had seen things, ignoring me as best she could.
"High praise," I murmured, wondering if she'd ever saved his life. If she'd carried him off a battlefield somewhere, or stood her ground when a lesser animal would have bolted, or—
I caught myself.
I wasn’t curious about Lorenzo Veyne. I wasn’t curious about his horse or his battlefields or the years that apparently existed between them.
I was curious about exactly nothing that didn't directly affect my survival for the next few weeks, and a vampire's sentimental attachment to a bad-tempered dark bay wasn’t on that list.
My attention slid back to Sugar.
Sugar turned those dark eyes on me for the first time, flat and assessing, like she knew exactly what I'd just been thinking and had opinions about it.
“Don't,” those eyes said.
Apparently, it ran in the family.
"She'll keep you alive on bad terrain." He swung up onto his grey in one unhurried motion, regarding me from what seemed like an unreasonable height. "Which matters more than whether or not she likes you."
"Does she like you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
His hazel eyes held mine for one beat. "Because I don't ask her questions she's already answered."
My mouth opened. Closed.
He looked at Sugar. "She's ready when you are."
Bastard, I thought, and grabbed the saddle.
With some difficulty, I finally ended up on the horse.
Technically. In the sense that I was on it and not on the ground, which I was choosing to count as a win.
The specifics would be taken to my grave.
I was just glad he’d stopped watching me like he was mentally drafting a casualty report at about minute four.
"Ready?" Lorenzo asked after I’d stopped breathing hard.
"Ecstatic," I huffed.
We rode out of the Divide as the sun came up, and I reached for home one more time without meaning to, and got nothing, and told myself that was fine.
The road to Tharros stretched ahead of us.
I flipped my dagger, caught it, and started counting all the ways this would go wrong.