Nadia #2
He let me stand. Slowly. His hand stayed at my elbow until I had my weight under me, and then he let go—reluctantly, his fingers lingering for a half-second longer than they needed to before he stepped back.
"Walk with me to the stables," he said, his words clipped. Controlled. "Then I'll settle with the magistrate."
It wasn't a suggestion.
He didn't offer me his arm. Didn't take mine. He just kept his pace deliberately slow enough that I could match it without giving myself away to the small stable yard behind the Three Crowns.
Sugar lifted her head when we entered, took one look at me, and pinned her ears. This was either in affront or concern—I couldn't tell anymore.
Enzo led me to her shoulder and didn’t let go of my elbow until I had a hand on the saddle to brace myself. Then he stepped close, and before I could protest, his hands found my waist and lifted me onto her back in one easy motion.
I landed in the saddle staring down at him.
"What are you—"
"I don’t trust you to keep your feet," he said, those blazing hazel eyes holding mine. "And you won't be tempted to follow me back inside."
"Enzo—"
"It’s Lorenzo. You stay right here," he growled with a menace that made me stop and listen. "You do not move. You do not so much as adjust the fucking reins. Are we clear?"
I opened my mouth to snap back, but I just didn’t have it in me.
"Crystal," I said flatly.
"Good." He stepped back. "Ten minutes."
He turned and walked across the yard, his stride even and unhurried, and disappeared through the back door of the Three Crowns.
I sat in the stable yard on a horse, who had finally stopped trying to throw me off, and tried to remember how to breathe.
This wasn’t how this was supposed to be going.
The king hadn’t chosen me to be put on a horse like a saddlebag by his son with a bad attitude.
He'd chosen me because I was good at what I did, because he trusted me, because in the entirety of his court there was apparently no one else he could put at his son's back with the certainty that we would both arrive in Tharros alive.
I need someone I trust in Tharros.
Those were his words. He’d looked at me from my bedside and he’d asked me—not commanded, not assigned, asked—and I had said “yes” before he’d finished the sentence.
I was supposed to be watching Enzo's back, supposed to be the unseen knife in the dark, the one his enemies didn't account for, the one who would handle the things he couldn't see coming.
Instead, I was sitting on a horse in a stable yard, too weak to stand.
Sugar shifted under me, the warm bulk of her solid and steady, and—for the first time since the courtyard at dawn three days ago—she didn’t bite me.
I think she knew I wouldn’t survive it.
We rode out of the village fifteen minutes later, the afternoon sun beginning its descent behind us, the road ahead long and gray under a sky that hadn't made up its mind about rain.
The villagers waved as we passed. Enzo nodded back, the same small acknowledgment for each of them, every name in its proper place. None of his anger touched any of them.
It was waiting for me.
Once we were a mile clear of the gates, he reined his horse beside Sugar and matched her pace. He didn’t look at me. His attention stayed fixed on the road ahead, too deliberate to be about the road at all.
He rode in silence for another long moment as the road stretched in front of us, the gray sky pressing against my skin.
"Now," he said. "Tell me what happened in that alley."
It wasn't a question.
I kept my eyes on the road. "I handled it."
"That wasn't what I fucking asked."
"It's what I'm telling you."
"Nadia." His voice had gone quiet in the particular way I was learning meant the most dangerous thing yet. "I’m not asking again."
I turned my head to look at him as the sky opened up. Scattered, cold, the first warning drops of rain before thunder crashed far too close for comfort.
He was still staring at the road, but his hands on the reins had gone white at the knuckles. His jaw was set so tight I could see the muscle working under the skin. He wasn't raising his voice. He didn't need to. The fury coming off him in waves was doing all the work for him.
"It's none of your business," I hissed.
"Wrong answer."
"Excuse me?"
"Wrong answer, Nadia." He finally turned to look at me, and the hazel of his eyes had gone hot in a way I hadn't seen before.
"I caught you in an alley. You were so cold I could feel it through your clothes.
There was no blood on you, which means whatever did that wasn't a wound.
Which means it was your magic. Which means you spent power you didn't have.
It means whatever happened was serious enough that you chose to spend it.
So, no. ‘None of my business’ is not an answer I'm accepting. "
"You don't get to accept anything—"
"I'm not your enemy," he cut in. "I'm not your handler. I'm the person who is riding into a province with you that we both know is significantly more dangerous than we were told. And you’re bleeding off power in alleys handling things you won't let me see. That shit ends today."
"It ends when I say it ends—"
"No." Flat. Absolute. "It ends now."
"You don't get to—"
"I can make you tell me, Nadia."
The words landed in the road between us cold, quiet, and unconditional.
Slowly, I turned toward him.
He was still staring straight ahead. His hands were white on the reins. His jaw was a hard line.
"Are you threatening me, Veyne?"
"I'm telling you the truth. I don't want to.
But you should be aware that the option exists.
There are at least three ways I could have your answer in the next five minutes if I chose to use them.
Compulsion. A taste. Other methods you wouldn't enjoy. I’m choosing not to.
Right now. In this moment. Don't mistake that for an absence of capability. "
The cold along my spine doubled. Tripled. Then all of it was replaced with white-hot rage that made me want to use every shadow at my disposal to gut him like a fish.
"You fucking—"
"I'm aware of how this sounds." He still wasn't looking at me.
"I'm aware that you would be entirely within your rights to put a knife in me right now and I would, frankly, deserve the attempt.
I'm telling you anyway. Because I rode into that village this morning watching you breathe through a saddle that was hurting you and saying nothing about it. And I rode out of it damn near carrying you back to your horse because you could barely stand. And I have spent every step since then deciding what I’m willing to do to keep you from doing that to me again, and I have concluded that the answer is ‘Quite a lot.’ So believe me when I tell you the choice you're making right now is not whether I find out what happened in that alley.
It is how. The easy way or the hard way. You pick."
The rain came down harder, the cold slicing into my flesh as I stared at the side of his face.
I had a hundred and sixty years of practice with men who tried to put me in corners, and none of them had ever come at me the way this one did—without raising his voice, without losing composure, without giving me a single piece of leverage I could use against him.
Because everything he'd just said was true.
That was the part I hated.
The truth of it. The restraint. The quiet, terrible certainty that he could take the answer from me and was choosing, for now, not to.
As if that made the threat cleaner.
As if that made him safer.
I had never wanted to put a dagger in anyone more than I wanted to put one in Lorenzo Veyne in that moment.
"Get out of my fucking face," I warned quietly, and it was the only one he would get.
He clicked once to his horse, and the grey lengthened its stride and pulled ahead of Sugar by a length, then two, until there was a clean ten feet of cold rain-soaked road between us.
And he didn’t look back.