Chapter 2 Enzo
Enzo
She'd been cursing for approximately four miles.
Not at me—or so she thought. Somewhere around the first hour, she'd slipped into a Shadow Fae dialect, the kind of fluid sideways shift that people made when they wanted to say something they didn't want understood, muttering under her breath in a language she clearly assumed was beyond me.
It wasn’t.
Forty years ago, I'd spent six months locating a Shadow Fae linguistics text and another six mastering it, because a man in my position couldn't afford ignorance of languages that powerful people assumed were private. It had seemed like a reasonable investment at the time.
At that moment, I was reconsidering.
"—and this saddle was designed by someone who has never sat on a horse once in their miserable fucking life. And when I find them, I'm going to make them sit on this monstrosity masquerading as leather for a gods-be-damned week and see how they like it—"
The road curved north. I adjusted.
"—couldn't have gotten us one horse that doesn't feel like riding a saints-forsaken battering ram—"
She wasn't wrong about the saddle. It was built for someone three times her size—I'd noted it the night before when I'd checked the gear and had already made a mental note to acquire a better one at the first village we passed.
Mentioning this wasn't an option. Telling her I'd noticed would require acknowledging that the saddle fit poorly because I had noticed precisely where it fit poorly, and that was a particular line of conversation I wasn't opening if I could help it.
There were a great many things I was paying attention to that wouldn’t ever pass my lips. The problem was that list kept growing.
Damn her.
Distracting—that was the word, chosen with the same precision I applied to blades, and for the exact same reason. She was a tactical variable with the potential to affect mission outcomes, and awareness was the first step toward management.
Management that was requiring considerably more effort than anticipated.
The second time I’d gotten a real look at her was when she stepped out of the Divide shadow.
The first had been when she’d yanked me through the void with no warning and no ceremony, at a moment I would not have chosen, mid-tryst with a Corventian countess who had been remarkably gracious about the interruption.
Nadia had given me thirty seconds to dress first, which I suspected had less to do with consideration and more to do with not wanting to explain a naked vampire prince to my brother.
And Nadia Voss had looked at me—still furious, still half-undone, on my knees on my brother's study floor—with the expression of someone storing information she intended to use later.
She hadn’t been wrong to store it. I could see that now.
She moved like someone who had survived too long to mistake attention for power, and too well to need anyone else to notice.
All black—fitted leather, a coat that fell to mid-calf and concealed nothing about her intentions, least of all the weapons.
I'd counted six visible blades before I stopped counting, because counting was becoming a problem for my concentration.
The pack across her back was military-efficient, which didn't fit the image she projected, which was the third inconsistency I’d cataloged before we'd even left the courtyard.
The horse, however, was a different matter entirely.
On the horse she sat like someone who had been told, exactly once, how riding was supposed to look and was executing every instruction simultaneously with grim determination.
Spine straight—too straight, rigid where it should have had give.
Heels down, which was correct, but her toes were dropping every time Sugar moved.
She was squeezing with her thighs the way you were supposed to, but gripping with her knees, too, which canceled half of it out.
The reins she held in a grip that was trying to be loose and failing.
She had all the right pieces. None of them were talking to each other.
Every time Sugar shifted gaits, her breath caught. Barely. Just a small, involuntary hitch she suppressed almost before it existed. Unfortunately, “almost” wasn’t good enough for vampire hearing.
I heard every sharp inhale, every quiet refusal to admit she was hurting, and it was doing far more damage to my concentration than all her creative profanity combined.
Saints save me, I almost preferred the cursing.
Somewhere around mile two, I'd adjusted our pace under the pretext of checking the road conditions ahead. I would continue to adjust as required.
"—just riding up there like a godsdamned statue, does he even have a spine, does anything move in that man—"
Several things moved. One of them, regrettably, had opinions about the sound of her breathing, the line of her thighs, and the particular violence of her mouth.
The road ran southeast through open farmland, fields lying fallow in the autumn cold, the occasional farmstead set back from the road, with smoke rising thin and gray from chimneys.
Familiar territory—I'd ridden this route more times than I could count, knew every village between here and the province border, knew which inns were clean and which weren't. I knew where the road went soft after rain and where the bridge over the Sethwyn had a structural issue the local magistrate had been ignoring for six months.
This land I knew the way I knew my own heartbeat.
Which made the traveler wrong before I'd fully processed why.
He appeared around the curve ahead on foot, which wasn't unusual.
The road saw regular traffic. But his boots were expensive and clean—he hadn't walked far—and he moved like someone who had a destination but was performing the absence of one.
He'd clocked our approach too early, adjusted his course to intercept with the casual precision of someone trained to make interception look accidental.
My pace stayed exactly the same. My hand dropped to my blade.
Behind me, Nadia went quiet in the way blades went quiet right before they left the sheath.
She had felt it, too. Good. That saved time.
"Travelers," the man called, raising a hand in greeting. Friendly. Open. Completely manufactured. "Good morning. Heading south?"
I drew my horse to a stop. "East."
"Ah." He fell into step beside the road, tilting his face up with the expression of someone making pleasant conversation.
Behind me, I heard Nadia dismount—quiet, practiced, the soft landing of someone who'd been doing this in one form or another for a very long time.
"Nasty stretch of road east of Millford, I'm told.
Washed out in last week's rains. You might consider going around. "
I swung down from my horse. Kept my body between him and Nadia, not because she needed the cover but because it gave her room to work without him tracking her position. "Thank you for the warning."
His eyes moved past my shoulder anyway, searching. "Just the two of you?"
Reasonable question, but also not.
I opened my mouth to redirect him, and then the shadows moved.
That was the only way to describe it: the shadows along the roadside, cast by the hedgerow and the curve of the road and the angle of the morning sun, simply moved.
Shifted. Something slipped between them that wore the dark like a second skin, and for a half-second, the world held its breath.
The shadows swirled around something bright—there and gone so fast that even my eyes almost missed it.
The traveler made a sound.
He was on his knees in the road with a blade buried in the meat of his shoulder, pinned with the precise economy of someone who had calculated exactly how much damage was necessary and applied exactly that amount.
Alive. Breathing. Not going anywhere—especially not with the dark magic that curled like vines around his limbs.
Nadia stepped out of a shadow six feet to my left, adjusting the cuff of her glove.
Three seconds. The whole thing had taken three seconds, and she'd done it around me, working the angles I'd opened for her without either of us saying a word.
I looked at the traveler. At the blade. At Nadia, who was examining her remaining weapons with the expression of someone conducting routine maintenance.
"He was going to signal ahead," she said, in the tone of someone explaining something obvious. "There's a shadow at the bend. Someone's waiting in it." A sideways glance at me—something in it that wasn't quite acknowledgment but was adjacent to it. "The positioning helped."
I held her gaze for a beat, a silent acknowledgment of the calculation we’d both made. Then we turned back to the man bleeding in the road.
"Who sent you?" I demanded, but I had a feeling I wouldn’t get an answer.
The traveler said nothing. His eyes were fixed on Nadia with the expression of a man fundamentally reconsidering his life choices.
"He won't talk to you," she said pleasantly, crouching to eye level with him.
"He's more afraid of whoever sent him than he is of a vampire prince.
" She tilted her head. "I, on the other hand, am not a prince.
" A beat of silence stretched taut between them, perfectly weighted.
"I'm something considerably less restrained. "
Whatever he saw in her eyes was enough to loosen his lips.
Which was wise of him, considering the shadows pinning him to the road weren't Nadia's most patient work. They coiled around his wrists and ankles with the particular quality of something alive—not tight enough to break anything, but enough to make the point comprehensively.
It wasn't much—a name, a location, a description of what he'd been paid to confirm. Enough.
Nadia tilted her head. The shadows tightened incrementally. "At the bend in the road," she said, almost pleasantly. "How many are waiting for us?"
"One," he gasped. "Just one. I swear it—"