Enzo
She made a small sound that might have been protest or relief or both and finally settled against me. It was only then that I realized she weighed nothing.
That was the part that hit. Not the bare feet against my thigh.
Not the thin warm shape of her against my chest with only the worn linen of my shirt between her skin and mine.
The fact that I'd lifted her and she'd weighed nothing, and somewhere in the back of my head a voice that sounded suspiciously like my own said, very clearly, fuck.
I'd had her in my arms before. In the courtyard when I'd lifted her onto Sugar. In the alley behind the saddler when I'd caught her before her knees gave. Each time I'd been operating with my mind on three other things that hadn't actually registered her dimensions in any meaningful way.
I sure as fuck registered them now.
I'd known, intellectually, that she was shorter than me—most people were.
But I'd been cataloging her for so long, the way she moved, the lethal economy, the violence she packed into every motion, the aura she carried through any room she entered like a blade balanced on its point, that somewhere in my head she'd grown to match the size of her presence.
The reality was a woman maybe five foot three on a good day.
Slight. Far too thin. The kind of thin that meant she'd been surviving on scraps instead of real food for a long stretch of years, and the kind of slight that meant she'd built every ounce of what she was out of compensation and skill and the iron refusal to let anyone help her.
She fit into that space like she'd been measured for it.
I didn’t think about that very hard, because thinking about it would end somewhere I couldn't currently afford to be.
She relaxed against me by degrees, the way a cat tested a windowsill before committing to it.
Her cheek found the bare skin of my collarbone.
Her hand came up tentatively to rest against my sternum, palm flat—checking, I thought, whether I was actually warm or just claiming to be.
Her bare feet pressed against my thigh, slow and careful.
I felt the exact moment her whole body decided that whatever this was, it was better than freezing.
The shaking didn't stop right away. It got bigger first—deep waves of it that moved through her in pulses, the way a body shook when it had been holding back for too long and finally had permission to let go.
I put my hand flat against her back beneath the blanket and held her steady through each wave, the worn cotton of my shirt shifting under my palm.
The neckline of my shirt slipped at her shoulder again, the collar gaping open until one cool pale curve of her bare shoulder pressed against my bare chest. I closed my eyes for one second and kept my hand exactly where it was.
Her heart thumped against my chest, slower than it should have been, working its way back to something steadier as the gradual return of warmth returned to her skin.
The wind found a crack somewhere in the eastern wall and made a thin, keening sound until it settled.
After perhaps half an hour, the shaking finally began to slow.
Her breathing grew deeper. The weight of her against my chest became something more, and I had the disquieting and unwelcome experience of realizing I'd been holding the woman I'd threatened on a road a few hours ago for however long—and she'd been letting me.
The only thought I could find to put against that fact was finally.
Finally. Finally? I had no business thinking it, and yet, I was anyway.
She shifted, the smallest fraction of an adjustment, and the hem of my shirt rode up a little higher on her thigh against the warm bare skin of mine.
I fought every instinct I had and froze like prey in a trap, closing my eyes against whatever was building in my chest.
"Enzo?"
Her voice came out small, but for the first time since she’d called me that cursed name, I didn’t mind. I hadn't heard her voice that small since the alley, when she'd told me, “We have to go.”
"Mm," I answered against the crown of her drying hair, trying not to grit my teeth.
A long pause stretched between us. She drew a breath against my collarbone, let it out slow, and drew another, like she was working up to something.
"Why did you do it?" she whispered, but that wasn’t the right word. A whisper was too big for the scant breath of sound coming from her.
I didn't understand the question.
She'd been silent for two hours on the road and another half-hour in this cabin against my chest, and I'd spent every minute of that silence cataloging the things she might choose to say to me when she finally chose to speak.
“Why did you do it” fit into none of the categories I'd prepared for.
I ran through the obvious answers fast. Why I'd threatened her.
Why I'd pushed her on the road. Why I'd made her sit a horse for two hours when she could barely stand.
Why I'd taken her here. Why I'd put my arm around her.
Why I'd put her in my lap. Why I'd lied to myself about why I'd done any of it.
None of them sounded like the question she was asking.
"Do what?"
She didn't answer for so long I thought she might have decided against it.
Then, even quieter, her breath skated across my collarbone. "The saddler."
Oh. Oh. Shit.
I'd spent the last few days telling myself that if she ever found out—and she absolutely could find out—I'd simply weather it.
Wouldn't bring it up. She'd never ask. Nadia didn't ask questions like that of men she despised.
She filed the answer away and used it later if the moment called for leverage.
It hadn't occurred to me she might ask it like this.
Quiet. Against my chest. With her teeth not quite chattering and her body finally beginning to warm and the bare curve of her shoulder pressed against my skin and the hem of my shirt riding up too high on her thigh against mine.
I considered lying for half a second.
Then I considered the woman I'd pulled out of the rain, and the woman I'd threatened on a road, and the woman who was asking me a question with what was very nearly the last of what she had in her tonight. And I concluded that whatever else I’d become in the last few hours, I wouldn’t lie to her now.
"Because the saddle was hurting you," I said quietly. "And I could solve it. And I didn't see any reason to ask permission of someone who'd have refused for no reason except that she doesn't let anyone help her with anything."
She was quiet for a moment.
"You sent it on the road," she murmured. "Probably that first night."
"I did."
"You never said a word."
"No, I did not."
She drew a slow breath against my chest. Let it out.
"That was—" She stopped, took a shuddering breath, and started again. "Kind of you. I don't know what to do with that."
And what kind of life had she led that a small gesture of basic decency was a foreign concept? "You don't have to do anything with it," I told her.
"That's not how it works."
"It is when I do it."
She made a small sound, ragged and tired, that was very nearly a laugh and not at all what I'd been expecting.
"Bastard," she breathed against my collarbone.
"Yes."
She didn't say anything else for a long time.
After a while her shivering slowed almost to nothing as her breathing evened out. Her head settled a little heavier against my collarbone, and her hand on my sternum went slack. Some part of my brain that was operating at a distance from the rest of me realized Nadia had fallen asleep on me.
In a hunting cabin.
In the middle of a storm.
And that I would have to sit with an arguably gorgeous pain in my ass draped over my lap for an unspecified number of hours and do exactly nothing about it.
Perfect.
The fire grew slowly, throwing thin gold light over the rough stone walls of a hunting cabin I hadn’t entered in years.
Outside, the rain kept its steady assault on the roof.
Inside, Nadia slept against my chest in nothing but my shirt, one hand curled against my skin where the linen had shifted aside, and I sat with my back to the wall and didn’t move.
Moving would have meant thinking.
Thinking would have ended badly.
She slept for perhaps an hour before the first whimper came.
At first, I thought it was the fire shifting. A small crack in the wood, a settling ember, the cabin answering the storm in its own language. Then it came again, smaller and closer, caught somewhere low in her throat.
Her fingers tightened against my chest.
Not enough to truly hurt, but enough that I felt each crescent of her nails against my flesh. Her face, what little I could see tucked against my collarbone, had gone tight. Her breathing shortened. The exhaustion that had finally dragged her under had turned on her.
“Nadia,” I whispered.
She didn’t wake. Wherever she’d gone, it wasn’t this cabin.
I had spent enough years near sleeping soldiers, intelligence operatives, people who carried more darkness than rest, to know the shape of a nightmare when it found a body.
She was somewhere else entirely—the alley, perhaps. Some old grief I had no right to name.
I didn’t wake her.
Instead, I tightened my arm around her by degrees, careful not to startle her into surfacing wrong. The blanket had slipped from her shoulder; I drew it back up and bent my head over hers, my mouth near the crown of her drying hair.
“You’re safe,” I murmured. “You’re safe. It’s only the rain.”
She made another small sound, and my heart lurched in my chest. For one useless moment, I tried to think of what else to do. What came wasn’t thought.
It was older than thought, older than duty, older than discipline, older than the rules I had built around myself until they’d become indistinguishable from bone.
It rose from a place I had sealed off centuries ago, when my mother died and I learned that some doors, once closed, were better left unopened.