Enzo
Two hours into the rain, I was still holding the line.
Eyes forward. Pace steady. Spine relaxed in the deliberate way that meant I was holding myself in iron control by every method I knew. Every instinct in me was pulling me to turn around, and I was refusing it one second at a time. So far, I was winning, but only by the thinnest margin.
Behind me, ten feet back, I could hear her breathing over the soft thud of Sugar's hooves on the soaked road. The small involuntary catches she still couldn't quite suppress when the cold cut through her clothes and reached the part of her the alley had hollowed out.
She was hurting.
She'd been hurting since I'd caught her stepping out of that stupid fucking alley.
Hurting worse since I'd made her sit a horse for two hours through driving rain because we couldn't stop.
Hurting worse still since I'd pulled my horse ahead of hers and left her to ride alone behind me with whatever furious cold thing was sitting in her chest.
I could fix any one of those three things in a heartbeat.
But I wasn't.
The part of me still functioning was the part that cataloged tactical variables, that had kept me alive through centuries of being passed over, that had built Tharros into the spine of the kingdom.
That part had reached a conclusion, somewhere between fury and terror, and it was this: I'd spent the entire journey treating her like a problem to be managed.
And the result was her bleeding out magic in an alley behind a saddler's shop while I'd been busy with a dead wagon driver, pretending the world she walked into when she stepped out of my sight wasn't a world that could swallow her whole.
I wouldn’t be making the same mistake twice.
Then the thunder cracked far too close for comfort.
I felt Sugar shy through the air before I heard her—the small reflexive panic of a horse who'd been steady all day and had reached the end of what that could do for her. Nadia sucked in a sharp breath as Sugar’s hooves skidded on the wet trail.
I had the grey turned and back to her before I'd finished thinking about it.
She was still in the saddle. Barely. Weight too far forward, hands too tight on the reins, every wrong instinct of a person who'd been taught to ride theoretically and was now applying every instruction simultaneously.
Sugar was dancing sideways in the road, head up, ears flat, ready to bolt the next time the sky cracked.
Nadia's face was the color of old bone. Her eyes were focused on something between herself and the beyond that I didn't think the rest of the world could see.
I caught Sugar's bridle.
"Look at me."
Her gaze stayed fixed on that far-off point.
"Nadia."
That one landed. Her eyes came up to mine—too dark, too wet at the edges, focused for the first time in the last quarter mile.
Nadia Voss didn't cry, certainly not in front of me, certainly not in this lifetime, but she'd reached the end of what a body could give, and what little was left was nearly gone.
"There’s a cabin," I murmured. "Over the ridge to the east. We can be there in ten minutes."
She nodded once in a jerky, clipped movement that was inherently wrong, and my fingers tightened on Sugar's bridle.
We rode the last stretch with my horse and hers connected by a single point of leather and my hand, and she made no protest. That alone told me how close to the floor of her she'd gone.
I wasn't going to dwell on it. Dwelling would lead me somewhere that ended with her even angrier than she already was, and I could afford that luxury even less than the silence.
The cabin was where I remembered—low and stone, tucked into the side of a wooded ridge where the trees broke the worst of the weather.
I'd used it twice. Once on a hunting expedition in my second century, once on a route inspection three years back.
The roof had been solid both times. The door had a working latch.
There was a hearth inside, and a stack of firewood under an overhang that was probably still dry.
I got us off the road and up the ridge and into the lee of the cabin before the next strike of lightning could decide to be closer than the last one.
Sugar and the grey could shelter under the overhang with the firewood, and they'd do well enough for the night. Both of them had carried us through worse than rain.
Nadia wouldn't be fine if I didn't move.
She got off Sugar by herself, and I let her.
She crossed the threshold of the cabin under her own power, and I let her do that, too.
But she only made it five steps into the single room before her knees did the thing they'd done in the alley.
Luckily, I managed to catch her before she went down—because the alternative was watching her hit the stone floor, and I was, as I'd recently established, no longer letting the world swallow her whole on my watch.
She didn't fight me. That was the second sign.
I lowered her onto the low bench near the hearth. Her hair was plastered to her skull, her lips faintly blue as her hands shook in her lap. She settled there with the still, patient exhaustion of a person who had run out of ways to pretend.
The fire took longer than it should have.
The wood from under the overhang was dry but the kindling wasn’t, and I had to coax it twice before it finally caught.
The whole time I worked, I was aware of her behind me—the small, ragged sound of her breath through the bitter silence.
It wasn't the silence of choice anymore.
It was the silence of having nothing left to fight with.
When the fire finally caught and started to grow, I turned back only to find she hadn't moved an inch.
"You're going to freeze before that fire gets warm," I murmured. "Get out of those clothes."
Her head lifted, and for the first time in our brief acquaintance, Nadia appeared to consider whether she could physically refuse a request. A moment passed before she inevitably concluded that she absolutely could not.
She started on the buckles of the wet leather coat with hands that didn't seem to entirely belong to her.
She managed the first. The second slipped through her fingers.
I crossed the room before I told my legs to move.
“Let me.”
And she did.
I knelt in front of her, unbuckling the coat with quick, efficient hands that allowed themselves no purpose beyond the task itself.
The leather was cold and heavy with rain; I peeled it off her shoulders and set it near the hearth.
The weapons rig came next, then the small, efficient web of blades and tools she wore like another layer of skin.
I laid each piece out carefully where it could dry, giving my attention to buckles, straps, and wet leather because the alternative was giving it to her.
That wasn’t an option.
I knelt again and untied her boots. They resisted, soaked stiff from the ride, but came free one at a time. Her socks were wet through. Those went beside the boots.
She watched me work with the unfocused exhaustion of a woman who had been operating on fumes for too long and had finally run dry.
“Shirt,” I said. “Can you?”
She nodded once, almost drunkenly.
Turning away, I dealt with my own gear. My coat was soaked through, and I fought with the leather as I peeled it from my arms. The shirt under it was absolutely drenched, and it came off next.
I stripped down to my undergarments without ceremony, because wet fabric in a freezing cabin was a danger to both of us, and modesty was a luxury the night hadn’t left us.
Behind me, her shirt hit the floor with a wet thwack. Then the heavier drop of her leather trousers. She fumbled with the thin damp layer beneath, and the small, frustrated sound she made when her hands refused to cooperate went through me harder than it had any right to.
I gave her a moment.
Then another.
When I faced her, she stood in the middle of the cabin with the last of her wet clothes pooled at her feet and nothing between her and the cold but shaking skin and sheer stubbornness.
She was looking at the blanket I’d set aside as if she knew it mattered but could no longer remember what it was for.
I had one second.
One.
And I fucking took it.
Then I looked away, reached for my pack, and pulled out a clean, dry shirt—mine, soft from years of wear, and the warmest thing in this cabin that wasn’t a body.
I crossed to her without letting my eyes go anywhere they had no right to be, gathered the shirt at the hem, and lifted it over her head.
With my help, her arms went through the sleeves, my hands touching only where the task required and never for longer than necessary.
The shirt was enormous on her.
The sleeves swallowed her hands. The hem fell to her knees. She seemed like she was drowning in linen and shadow and the worst night of the past month combined, and I had never in my life seen anything I was less prepared to look at or more incapable of looking away from.
The wool blanket came next, and I wrapped it around her shoulders, drew it close, and tucked it beneath her chin with steadier hands than I deserved.
“Sit down before you fall down,” I ordered, but it came out almost like a request.
Nadia plopped to the bench with all the grace of a wet noodle as the shakes took hold of her.
She was wrapped in the blanket like a person grateful for the small mercy of cloth, only her face and the top edge of my shirt visible above the wool.
Her hair was still soaked, her feet bare.
They were probably the part of her that was coldest and they were on the cold stone of the cabin floor, which was actively undoing what little progress the fire had made.
I sat down on the bench beside her.
She didn't move.
I watched the fire and listened to her teeth try not to chatter, and I ran the calculation through one more time to make sure I had the answer right.
The fire wasn't going to be enough. Not fast enough. She'd been in the cold rain for hours after spending power she didn't have, and her body wasn't going to climb back to functional on hearth heat alone.
I had a better solution, but I did not, in any sense of the word, want to use it.
And because I actually wasn’t the cold, emotionless cretin she thought I was, I would use it anyway.
Crossing to my pack, I pulled out the bedroll.
Unrolled it on the floor in front of the hearth, close enough that the warmth of the fire would reach but not so close that an ember could find it.
Spread the second blanket from my pack on top of the bedroll—thicker than the wool one already wrapped around her, the one I traveled with for exactly these kinds of conditions.
Sat down on it with my back against the rough stone of the wall behind me, bare to the waist with nothing between my skin and the cold air of the cabin except the heat my body produced on its own.
Only then did I face her.
"You're not warming up fast enough," I murmured, my voice coming out flatter than I'd intended. Fine. Flat was what this needed to be. "Vampires run hot. I'm a faster heater than the fire."
Her head turned slowly, and her eyes—that inky, gold-flecked darkness I'd been carefully refusing to look at for the better part of a week—found mine.
She didn't answer at first, didn't have to.
I could see her doing the calculation I'd just done.
The same math. The same conclusion. The same answer she wanted to disagree with and didn't have the strength to fight.
"Come here," I coaxed softly, gentler than I’d ever been to anyone maybe ever, but she didn’t move.
“I swear I don’t bite without permission,” I joked, earning me just the slightest curve of her lips.
Slowly she stood, her unsteady legs barely holding her weight.
She took the two steps from bench to bedroll like the floor was farther away than it should have been before lowering herself to the blanket beside me.
After a moment of what seemed to be indecision, she leaned her shoulder against mine and stayed there.
It was so much smaller a gesture than I'd braced for that I almost didn't know what to do with it.
It was also, by every measure, not even remotely enough.
She was making a polite half-attempt at body heat because she didn't have the energy to argue, but her shoulder against mine would warm her up sometime around the next equinox.
I gave her ten seconds because some civilized, useless part of me still wanted to let her choose. Then her head dipped once, as if even holding it upright had become one indignity too many, and civilization could go fuck itself.
I lifted her—one hand under her arms, one beneath her thighs, careful of the bruises I could see and the injuries I couldn’t.
I turned her and set her sideways across my lap in one motion, drawing the blanket around both of us before the cold could steal whatever small heat remained between her skin and mine.
She made no sound. No protest. No breathless insult. Her fingers only twitched once, then stilled. That silence nearly undid me.
I tucked her bare feet against my thigh beneath the wool, where my skin could warm them directly, and pulled her closer until her cheek rested near my throat and the damp line of her body fit against my chest.
Too easily. Too quietly.
“Nadia,” I said.
Her lashes didn’t so much as flutter.
I slid one hand beneath the blanket and pressed my palm flat between her shoulder blades. Her heartbeat moved there, faint and slow and wrong enough to make something cold open in my own chest.
Tightening my hold around her, I finally understood.
I wasn’t warming her.
I was keeping her from slipping the rest of the way under.