Nadia
His elbow slammed over the edge.
For one impossible second, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Then his shoulder followed. Then one knee hit the broken road hard enough to splash mud across both of us.
The shadows screamed through me as they hauled, dragging him the last few inches over the lip and onto solid ground. They didn’t let go until he was fully beside me, on his hands and knees in the rain, breathing harder than I had ever heard him breathe.
Alive. He was alive. I had him. Fuck, I had him.
I sat back on my heels because I couldn’t stay upright any other way, and we stared at each other.
His hair was wet with mud, his coat dark down one side where he’d scraped the cliff edge, and there was a thin scratch across his cheekbone already knitting itself closed.
His chest was heaving. His hazel eyes were fixed on my face with an intensity I had never seen from him before—not careful, not contained, not the iron control he wore over everything.
Naked.
Stripped down to whatever lived beneath the four-hundred-plus years of him.
He didn’t say thank you. Hell, he didn’t say anything.
His hand came up to the side of my face, rough with mud and shaking just enough that I felt it before he forced the tremor still. His thumb dragged once across my cheekbone, slow and disbelieving, like he needed proof I was real. Like he needed proof I was still there.
Then he leaned forward and stole my breath with a kiss.
His mouth found mine with all the force of that suspended second over open air, as if every calculation had ended here. Me. My hands in the mud. My voice saying, “I have you.” My body between him and the fall.
The kiss hit like a storm breaking.
Warm. Hard. Desperate in a way I felt before I understood it.
His fingers slid from my cheek into my hair, curving around the back of my skull, not holding me still so much as holding himself together.
His mouth moved over mine once, then again, rougher the second time, and the sound that broke from him was low and ragged and furious, like kissing me had answered one question and asked twenty worse ones.
I should have pulled away.
I didn’t.
My hands caught in the front of his coat, dragging him closer before sense could get its claws into me.
His lips were cold from the rain and hot underneath, and when he tilted my head and deepened the kiss, my whole body forgot the mud, the cliff, the bloodless terror still shaking through my hands.
His tongue brushed the seam of my mouth, a question he barely seemed capable of asking, and I answered by opening for him.
Saints help me, I opened for him.
He made another sound then, darker, nearly broken, and kissed me like restraint had finally found the one thing it couldn’t survive.
His teeth grazed my lower lip—not a bite, not quite, but close enough that heat lanced through me, sharp and stupid and completely inappropriate considering we were kneeling in the mud beside a road that had just tried to kill him.
I kissed him back anyway.
Harder.
His hand tightened in my hair. Mine fisted in his coat.
The shadows around us shivered, reaching, hungry little traitors that they were, and for one wild second, I thought if he pulled me any closer, if his mouth did that again, if he made that sound against my tongue one more time, I might let the whole ruined road collapse beneath us just to avoid having to stop.
Then he did stop. Because some surviving piece of Lorenzo Veyne’s four centuries of discipline had apparently crawled out of the wreckage, grabbed him by the throat, and dragged him back.
He pulled away only an inch, breathing hard, his forehead resting against mine.
“Call me Enzo,” he murmured, his breath warm against my lips. “I find I don’t mind it so much coming from you.”
I closed my eyes.
I didn’t have words for what opened in my chest. I hadn’t had words for it since the alley yesterday, and I didn’t have them now. His hand was still on my face. His forehead was still against mine. The road beneath our knees was the same road that had nearly taken him from me a minute ago.
So I gave him the only thing I had.
“Enzo.”
The name came out softer than I meant it to.
His thumb moved once more across my cheekbone. Then he let me go by degrees.
His hand fell first. Then his forehead lifted from mine.
Then he drew back far enough that the cold air slipped between us again and reminded me we were kneeling in mud on the edge of a ruined road with one horse gone over the side and the other watching us like she’d been personally responsible for saving both our stupid lives.
Which, unfortunately, she might have been.
Enzo got to his feet slowly, controlled even now, though I caught the small inventory happening in the shift of his shoulders, the careful settling of his weight, the flex of one hand before he let it fall. Whatever hurt, he kept it to himself.
He crossed to Sugar without speaking.
She stood rigid at the edge of the road, ears still pinned, every line of her big dark body braced toward the place where the ground had vanished. When Enzo reached her, she didn’t toss her head. Didn’t step away. Didn’t bare her teeth at him or at me or at the entire concept of being perceived.
He put a hand against her jaw and rested his forehead against hers.
The words he murmured were too low for me to hear, but his voice had gone to that warm, private place I was learning he reserved for animals, the dying, and people he respected too much to lie to.
Sugar closed her eyes.
The sight of it did something unpleasant to the fragile architecture of my ribs. I stayed where I was, mud soaking into my knees, and let him have the moment he was not asking for.
After a while, he left Sugar and walked to the broken edge of the road.
He stood there with the wind pulling at his coat, staring down into the place where his horse had disappeared.
Not long. Maybe a minute. Maybe less. Long enough for the silence to gather around him.
Long enough for the man who had nearly fallen to his death to mourn the animal that had gone instead.
Then his shoulders changed. The prince came back first. Then the commander. Then the man with maps in his coat and contingencies behind his teeth. By the time he turned, his face had been put back together.
It had cost him. I could see that in the set of his jaw, in the careful line of his shoulders, in the way he crossed the mud like each step had been issued an order and intended to obey. He stopped in front of me and held out his hand.
I took it. He pulled me to my feet slowly. When my knees made the deeply inconvenient decision to wobble, his other hand came to my elbow and stayed there.
“You’re cold,” he said.
I wasn’t. Not the way I’d been yesterday. This cost was different—sharper, cleaner, more like a debt paid in one bright line than the deep, marrow cold of the alley.
But Enzo had nearly died. His horse had just gone over a cliff. His hand was still around my elbow like letting go might test the patience of every god in Veyntheir.
I didn’t argue the point.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Mm.”
His hand didn’t move.
“Enzo. I’m fine.”
That did it—the name. His grip eased. He glanced toward Sugar, then toward the jagged place where the road had been. His jaw tightened once before he spoke.
“My rations went with him.”
It took me half a second to understand. Another full second to understand what he hadn’t said. Rations. Not food.
Trail bread could be replaced. Dried meat could be bought. Horse feed could be begged, borrowed, or paid for with the kind of coin a prince always had access to, even when his saddlebags were at the bottom of a ravine.
But “rations,” in the quiet way he’d said the word, meant something else. Something that couldn’t be replaced in a village shop.
I had spent enough years in vampire courts to know what kind of rations a vampire prince carried on a multi-week ride.
“How much did you have left?” I asked.
“Eleven days, rationed.”
“How many days to Tharros?”
“At our previous pace? Ten.” Enzo’s gaze moved over the broken road, the mud sloughing loose at the ruined edge, the place where the grey had vanished. His jaw tightened. “On one horse, with the road in this condition? Twelve. Maybe thirteen.”
The wind came up through the break in the road, cold and damp and smelling of wet stone.
“Enzo.”
“It’s manageable.”
His voice was too even.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s what I’m telling you.”
The words landed between us with an ugly familiarity.
I had said that exact thing to him yesterday, in the rain, when he’d asked what happened in the alley. He hadn’t let me hide behind it then. I wouldn’t let him hide behind it now.
But I had been around vampires for the better part of a hundred and sixty years, and I knew the shape of this conversation before it started.
He couldn’t ask me. Wouldn’t ask me. Vampire princes didn’t ask Shadow Fae mercenaries for blood, especially not vampire princes who had threatened said Shadow Fae mercenaries on a road less than twenty-four hours ago.
There were centuries of court protocol standing between him and the question. There was also Lorenzo Veyne himself, which was somehow worse. He would starve himself into the dirt before he asked me for a single thing more than he thought he’d already taken.
Fine. We would do this another way.
Just not here, on the broken edge of a road with the wind dragging at my coat and Sugar standing rigid beside us like she was prepared to personally object to every bad decision we made from this point forward.
“We need to get off this road,” I said.
“Yes.”
“There’s a village ahead.”
“Maeven’s Hollow.” He flexed his hand once at his side, then stilled it. “Two hours at a walk on one horse. Longer if the road worsens.”
“Can it offer us a bed?”
That drew his attention back to me with the careful pause of someone who’d heard the question beneath the question and didn’t yet know what I meant to do with it.