Nadia
On principle, I loathed the bright, clear morning. The storm had washed the sky clean, which felt aggressively unnecessary, and I immediately wished I’d stayed inside.
Not because of the air, which smelled like every winter forest I had ever walked through.
Not because of the horses, who had survived the night under the overhang and seemed, to my untrained eye, entirely unbothered by it.
Not even because of Sugar, who lifted her head when she saw me and pinned her ears in what I had come to understand as her version of greeting.
But because I had just spent the night sleeping on Lorenzo Veyne's bare chest in nothing but his shirt, and I had to walk out into the world and pretend my entire body didn’t still feel the shape of him pressed against the parts of me he had no business touching.
I checked the horses' tack first because checking the horses was something I knew how to do now.
Sugar suffered me. The grey ignored me. I went through the buckles and the girths and the bridles with the careful attention of a woman who had been raised to do many things and had only recently been taught the basics of horse maintenance by a vampire prince who was, even now, somewhere behind me probably refolding a map or readjusting a schedule we were never going to keep.
The door opened behind me, soft as a held breath. The shadows under my boots stirred, reaching back toward the shape of him before the latch clicked shut.
Absolutely not.
Refusing to turn around, I dragged them back beneath my feet before they could embarrass us both.
I felt him crossing the small clearing in the loose, efficient way he always crossed open ground, like a soldier who had learned not to waste motion where enemies might see it.
He stopped at the grey’s head and ran a practiced hand over the bridle, checking leather, buckle, and bit with the same quiet precision he brought to everything else.
I kept my eyes on Sugar’s girth and didn’t look up. The leather was already tight enough. I checked it anyway, because apparently, I had decided straps were fascinating and the vampire prince standing ten feet away was none of my concern.
“Road’s going to be a mess,” he murmured.
He was talking to the grey, technically. Or the morning. Or me, if I chose to be difficult about it.
I chose not to be difficult. For once.
“Mm.”
Sugar shifted under my hand, and I smoothed my palm down her side before she could take offense at my continued existence.
“Could be slow,” he added.
“Mm.”
Another silence settled between us, easier than it had any right to be and weighted enough that I could feel every inch of it.
He ran a hand down the grey’s nose. The horse huffed softly into his palm, and Enzo murmured something too low for me to catch.
I hated that voice. It was too gentle to defend against.
“Nadia.”
My fingers stilled on the girth.
He hadn’t said it sharply. Hadn’t commanded. Hadn’t wrapped the word in all that prince-born authority he could put on like armor when he wanted to be impossible. Just my name. Quiet. Careful. Like he knew exactly how close I was to bolting and had no intention of giving me a reason.
Finally, I looked up.
He was watching me from across the grey's withers, his dark hair still damp from washing his face in the basin inside, his coat already on and buttoned, his expression doing the very still patient thing it did when he was waiting for something to land that I hadn't yet caught.
"Yes," he said quietly, "it happened."
Gritting my teeth against a conversation I absolutely didn’t want to have, I settled on just staring at him.
"And no," he continued, much to my dismay, "I’m not going to make either of us talk about it before breakfast. Or possibly ever. But I'm not going to pretend you didn't sleep in my shirt either, because I can see you trying to figure out how to spin it in your brain."
"I am not—"
"You absolutely are."
I snapped my mouth closed.
He went back to the grey's bridle, the corner of his mouth doing something that might have been amusement on any other man's face. On him it was the rusty echo of a thing loosely resembling a grin.
I went back to Sugar's girth and didn’t let myself look at it for long.
We finished checking the horses in a quiet that had absolutely nothing at all to do with discomfort.
Within the hour we were mounted and aimed back down the ridge.
The high cold sky stretched above us in a pale clean blue that suggested the storm had been a personal grievance the world was now finished with.
The world, however, wasn’t finished with us. The road told us so within ten minutes.
The storm hadn’t been kind to anything. Trees were down everywhere.
The track was rutted and pocked with standing water in every low place, the mud beneath it churned to slop.
We picked our way around two fallen branches and one full tree before we’d even left the ridge.
And by the time we hit the long sloping stretch of road running along the side of the wooded hill above the valley, Lorenzo was riding ahead at a careful pace.
I was definitely not watching the back of his shoulders and trying very hard not to think about anything except the road conditions.
Sugar started acting up around the second hour.
She’d been mostly fine. She’d stopped trying to bite me a few days ago, and she’d carried me through the rain yesterday with what I had reluctantly begun to acknowledge was a kind of unsentimental competence, and this morning she’d even let me adjust her saddle without rolling her shoulder.
Now she was tossing her head and shortening her gait.
"Please," I begged. "Don't start this shit now."
She didn't stop.
She kept walking, but her ears stayed flat, and every other stride she was nudging at the bit as if she wanted to argue about which side of the road we were on.
I tried to ease her toward the inside, away from the drop.
She gave me the kind of resistance that wasn't quite a refusal but wasn't cooperation, either.
"What is your problem?"
The blasted horse didn’t answer. No, Sugar continued to express her grievance—with the road, with me, with possibly the universe as a whole—by behaving like a horse three times her age who had developed opinions about which direction we ought to be heading.
Twenty feet ahead, Lorenzo turned in his saddle to look back at us.
"What's she doing?" he asked.
"Being herself? Having a stroke? Being an asshole? How the fuck should I know?"
He frowned. "She's not—"
Sugar lurched to a stop, all four hooves planted, head up, ears pinned so flat against her skull they had nearly disappeared into her mane.
When I clicked my tongue at her, trying to nudge her forward with my heels, she didn’t so much as twitch.
No, her stubborn ass backed up. One step. Then another.
"Sugar—"
Then she reared.
Not all the way—not some dramatic, mane-flying attempt to throw me into the next province—but enough that my stomach dropped and my ass nearly followed. I wasn’t a rider. I was a person who had been placed on a horse and told, with great confidence, to survive it.
I grabbed the saddle horn, hauled myself back into the seat, and swore at her in my mother’s tongue.
"What the fuck is your problem—"
She backed up again. Three more steps. Away from Lorenzo. Away from where he and the grey stood on the road ahead.
Something cold moved through me before my mind caught up.
The shadows along the road edge were doing something I didn’t have a word for—not threatening, not dangerous, just attentive. Like they’d noticed something and were waiting to see if I would notice it, too.
Sugar had her ears pinned, her weight back, and no intention of moving forward. She wasn’t refusing me. She was making me retreat.
This was the horse who had sensed me in the shadows before she’d ever seen me. The horse Lorenzo trusted more than most people. The best horse he’d had in a hundred and forty years.
And I had been riding for less than a week.
“Oh,” I breathed.
Sugar knew.
My head snapped up. “Enzo—”
He’d already turned the grey back toward us.
The grey took one step.
The road gave way.
Not all at once. Not in a way my mind understood quickly enough to be useful.
One moment, the grey’s forehoof touched wet ground.
The next, the road beneath him sagged with a soft, terrible sound, mud and stone sliding away from each other like they had only been pretending to hold.
His forequarters dropped first, sudden and wrong, the rest of him following before the warning in my throat could become a word.
Lorenzo moved on instinct.
His hand hit the pommel. His weight shifted back. His face went utterly still in the half-breath between danger and disaster, all that lethal control narrowing to one impossible calculation.
Then the ground under the grey’s front hooves disappeared.
And they went with it.
The grey screamed. Or I did. I didn’t know which.
The shadows were already reaching for me because I was already reaching for them, and I went through the dark hard enough that it tore the breath out of my lungs.
One moment I was on Sugar. The next, I was at the broken edge of the road, dropping to my knees in wet mud while loose stones skittered over the side and vanished into empty air.
Lorenzo was over the edge.
Not fallen. Not yet.
Somehow, impossibly, he’d cleared the saddle. Soldier’s instinct, centuries of it, had thrown his weight free of the grey the moment the horse went under him. One hand had caught the broken lip of the road.
The rest of him hung over nothing.
And his grip was slipping.
I reached the edge, and the face that looked back at me wasn’t the one I’d spent the last week learning. Not the prince. Not the commander. Not the insufferable man with a map for every disaster.
This was the face of a man who had calculated the fall beneath him and found no survivable angle.
A man who knew he was about to lose.
No.
I reached down and caught his wrist with both hands.
The shadows came when I called. They wrapped me first, hard and fast, coiling around my thighs, my hips, my ribs, anchoring me to the broken road like black roots driven deep into the earth. Then I sent the rest of them down.
Tethers. Tendrils. Anything that would hold.
They slid around his arm, his shoulder, the line of his back where my hands couldn’t reach, taking the weight my body couldn’t. The cost hit the back of my throat first, sharp and bitter, then sank lower—into my spine, my bones, the hollow place where the deep still refused to answer.
I held on anyway.
“I have you,” I whispered, the breath tearing from my lungs.
The words came out in the dialect of my childhood. I didn’t choose them. There was no room left in me for choosing.
“I have you. I have you. I have you.”
He didn’t answer.
For one half-second, his hazel eyes met mine, and something naked passed through them. Something raw enough to hurt. Then the soldier came back. The mask snapped into place. His free hand closed around my forearm, hard enough to bruise.
“Pull,” I ordered.
He pulled. I pulled. The shadows hauled with us.
Mud gave beneath my knees. Pain sparked bright behind my eyes, sharp enough to turn the world white at the edges. The dark around my body tightened until I could barely breathe, holding me to the broken road while every other piece of me reached for him.
For one impossible second, it worked. His shoulder rose. His free hand found a jagged edge of stone. My grip tightened around his wrist, slick with mud and blood and the awful weight of him.
“Yes,” I hissed. “Come on, you arrogant bastard.”
His fingers dug into the road as my shadows strained. Then the road cracked. The sound moved through the stone beneath my knees like a bone splitting under a boot.
Enzo heard it, too. His eyes lifted to mine, and the mask broke. Just once. Just long enough for me to see the truth beneath it. If I held him, the road would take us both.
“No,” I said before he could speak.
His hand tightened around my forearm. “Nadia.”
“No.”
The crack widened beneath me, black water and loose stone grinding somewhere below. One of the shadow-tethers snapped with a sound like silk tearing through teeth, and his weight dropped another inch.
My arms screamed.
“Nadia,” he said again, quieter this time.
I knew that tone. Command dressed as mercy. Resignation sharpened into a blade.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” I whispered.
His eyes held mine. Then his hand shifted—not slipping, choosing.
“No,” I snarled, and hauled with everything I had left.
The shadows surged. The road split.
And for one suspended heartbeat, all I felt was the impossible weight of him in my hands and the terrible certainty that no amount of strength, rage, or desperation would be enough to keep him from falling.