Chapter 2 Enzo #2
She looked at me. I’d already heard the horse leave at his first word. Too far to catch without leaving Nadia and the horses exposed. I gave her a single nod.
The shadows released him. He stayed on his knees anyway, which showed good judgment.
I stepped forward. Let the man look at me—really look, the way people did when they finally understood what they were dealing with. Then I held his gaze and spoke, low and even, the particular cadence that had nothing to do with volume and everything to do with what lived underneath it.
"You argued with the travelers on the road,” I said. “The Shadow Fae is injured—flagging badly. They made camp two miles west. They won't reach the border crossing for another four days at least."
The man's eyes went soft and distant, the particular unfocused look of someone receiving a new memory. His lips moved slightly, rehearsing it, making it his own.
"You'll tell them exactly that," I said. "Nothing more."
He nodded. Slow. Certain.
I moved back.
Nadia hadn't budged. She was watching me with an expression I hadn't seen from her yet—sharper than her usual assessment, the look of someone updating a calculation they'd thought was finished. Updating it upward, if I had to guess.
"Leave the blade," I told him. "Go."
He pulled it free, set it carefully on the road like an offering, and left at considerable speed for a man with a fresh hole in his shoulder.
She'd calculated exactly right. So had I.
Nadia crouched where he'd knelt, retrieved her blade, and produced a cloth from somewhere on her person with the efficiency of someone who had never once cleaned a weapon on grass like an animal. She checked the edge. Sheathed it.
"You could have handled that from the start," she murmured, her eyes never leaving the road.
"So could you," I replied.
Her gaze lifted to me then. Something moved in her expression, too sharp for a smile and too guarded for respect. Whatever it was, it had not decided what to call itself yet. She turned back to Sugar without another word.
What happened next, I observed from the corner of my eye, because looking directly would have been unkind, and I wasn’t an unkind man.
She approached Sugar with the same fluid economy she brought to everything on the ground. Gathered the reins. Put her foot in the stirrup.
Sugar planted her feet and contemplated the middle distance.
Nadia got approximately halfway up. Sugar shifted—not dramatically, just the particular minimal movement of a horse who had made a decision, and Nadia came back down.
She tried again.
Sugar waited until she was fully committed and then rolled her shoulder.
"You absolute—" The rest arrived in dialect, inventive and comprehensive, delivered at a volume suggesting she'd abandoned subtlety entirely.
I was already back on my horse, having swung up in one motion the way I had a thousand times over four centuries, and was looking at the road ahead with no particular expression on my face.
On the third attempt, through what appeared to be sheer bloody-minded determination, she got halfway up, and Sugar rolled her shoulder again, and somehow, I had already crossed the distance between us before I'd consciously decided to move.
My hands found her waist. I lifted her onto the horse.
It took approximately one second. She weighed nothing to me—I could have lifted the horse if the situation had called for it. A completely practical solution to a logistical problem.
That was all it was.
She ended up in the saddle staring down at me with an expression I hadn't seen on her face before—startled, genuinely startled, the expression of someone whose reflexes had failed them for the first time in recent memory.
Like she'd been preparing a response to a third failure and hadn't had time to prepare one for this.
I stepped back, turned my attention to the road, and walked to my horse. Swung up in one motion.
"That was—" she started.
"Practical," I said flatly.
Something moved across her face—amusement, maybe, or the ghost of an argument she'd decided wasn't worth having.
"Right," she murmured. "Practical."
She straightened her spine, lifted her chin, and stared at the road ahead like it had personally offended her.
My hands remembered the shape of her waist for considerably longer than was practical.
Gods damn it.
I managed that back into place. Mostly.
The silence between us gathered like a storm that hadn’t decided whether to pass us by or tear something open.
"Not a word," she warned.
"I haven't said anything," I replied evenly.
"You were thinking it."
"I was thinking about the route adjustment," I answered, which was also true, and both things could be true simultaneously, and I nudged my horse forward before anything on my face could become a problem.
She made a sound in dialect that would have made a court scholar weep. It joined a growing collection of things she’d said that she thought I didn’t understand. A category that was becoming unwieldy.
Something shifted in my chest—quiet, inconvenient, the specific warmth of a thing I hadn't felt in long enough that I'd stopped expecting to feel it. I put it where all inconvenient things belonged: deep beneath every shadow I refused to acknowledge.
The road stretched ahead. Long and straight and entirely too eventful already.
We made camp two hours before dark, in the lee of a farmstead wall that blocked the worst of the wind.
Around mile fifteen, the rocky track had taken a shoe from my gray.
Minor. Manageable. Still enough to cost us time, and pressing on after dark with one compromised hoof would have been arrogance, not discipline.
Seventeen minutes for setup. It should have been twelve, but Nadia was helping.
She was helping in the way of someone who had identified, with considerable intelligence and complete honesty, that she had no idea what she was doing—and was therefore applying significant skill to the performance of a competence she didn't possess.
She'd picked up a tent stake and held it the way you held something when you didn't know what it was for and weren't going to ask.
I took it from her without comment. Handed her a task she could do—sorting the supply packs by weight distribution.
She did it with the swift efficiency of someone accustomed to moving weighted loads through tight spaces and took a full inventory of both packs with her eyes in approximately ninety seconds, which wasn't a skill acquired by accident.