Nadia
Icrossed to the chair beside the bed and slid my favorite dagger from its sheath—the one I’d worn against my hip since I was sixteen, the one I’d cleaned and oiled and sharpened a thousand times. Familiar weight. Familiar grip. Familiar edge.
Useful.
Then I walked across the room with it in my hand and his shirt brushing my knees, and I didn’t let myself think too hard about what I was doing. Thinking would have stopped me, and somewhere on the broken road that morning, I’d decided I was done being stopped.
I opened the screen and stepped inside.
He wasn’t asleep.
He lay back against the rim of the copper tub, head tipped against the lacquered wood, eyes closed as steam curled around him in slow, silver ribbons.
I had three full seconds before he heard me.
Three seconds.
And fuck if I didn’t use each and every one.
Saints above.
The long, muscled line of his throat. The hollow at the base of it.
The broad cut of his shoulders, slick with water and firelight, the kind of shoulders that had worn armor, carried command, and probably ruined a great many people’s good sense before mine had ever wandered into danger.
His chest rose and fell in one slow breath, all smooth, tan skin and hard-earned muscle, crossed here and there by pale scars that had healed clean but not kindly.
A thin white line cut across one collarbone. Another disappeared beneath his ribs. There was a narrow scar near his left shoulder, as though a blade had gone in and barely missed something important, and a rougher one low on his side that hadn’t been made by anything clean.
Battle scars. They read like history written by violence on a body that had survived all of it.
His arms rested along the rim of the tub, long and lean and corded, veins visible beneath wet skin at the inside of his forearms. His hands—gods, his hands—were loose now, finally still, and I hated that I knew exactly how they felt at my waist, in my hair, braced against my back beneath a blanket while I pretended not to need him.
His wet dark hair had been pushed back from his face. The scratch across his cheekbone from the cliff was nearly gone with only a faint pink line to show for it. His jaw caught the firelight in a way that felt personally vindictive.
I had spent nearly a week not looking at that jaw. On principle. For survival. Because some half-sane part of me had understood that if I ever let myself look properly, I would become the sort of woman who made stupid-as-fuck decisions in bathing rooms while holding knives.
Unfortunately, here we were.
The water shifted with his breathing. Beneath the surface, the dark shape of him blurred where the steam met copper and shadow, and I absolutely did not let my eyes drop lower than the hard plane of his stomach.
I was about to do something that required my entire attention. The rest of him wasn’t conducive to that at all.
Then he heard me.
His hazel eyes opened, finding me through the steam with brutal precision. For one bare second, the man in the bath wasn’t prince or commander or controlled, court-bred bastard. He was just Enzo, wet and tired and half-starved, looking at me in his shirt with a knife in my hand.
Then the iron came back down as his gaze dropped to the blade.
“Nadia.” Low. Quiet. Warning enough to raise the fine hairs along the back of my neck.
“I told you I wasn’t going to let you refuse.”
“You didn’t mention cornering me in a bath.”
“No,” I said. “But I did mention the starving.”
His jaw flexed. The water moved softly around him, steam curling over the hard line of his shoulders. He didn’t cover himself. Didn’t reach for the towel folded on the bench. Didn’t move at all, actually, which somehow made the entire room feel smaller.
“Put the knife down.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Nadia.”
“Enzo.”
That got me the slightest narrowing of his eyes. Good. If I was going to do something stupid, he could at least suffer with me.
“Sit down,” he said. “Please.”
“I’m fine where I am.”
“You’re in my shirt, barefoot, holding a blade I haven’t given you permission to use.”
When was he going to figure out that I didn’t answer to him?
“And yet,” I said, lifting one shoulder, “here we are.”
The water shifted as his hand tightened around the rim of the tub.
“Don’t.”
The word was quiet enough to be tender, which made it worse.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t make me ask.” His voice scraped lower.
“Don’t put me in the position of refusing you, accepting you, or watching you cut yourself because you’ve decided those are the only choices left.
I have spent the entire day trying to find a way around this conversation. Don’t take the last one from me.”
“I’m not making you ask.” My grip tightened around the dagger. “I’m offering.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“No, it isn’t. If you ask, you owe me. If I offer, you owe me nothing.”
His eyes closed for one second. When they opened again, they’d gone dark enough to make my breath catch.
“I won’t take it,” he said. “Not from you.”
The words hit harder than I’d braced for.
I’d expected protocol. Duty. Some polished refusal dressed in manners and court law.
I hadn’t expected “Not from you” in that voice, with his bare shoulders gleaming in the firelight and one white-knuckled hand wrapped around the copper rim like the only thing keeping him in the tub was the force of his own restraint.
Unfortunately for both of us, I had one move left. And I was going to take it. I lifted the dagger to the side of my neck.
His whole body stilled. “Put it down.”
“Last chance.”
“Nadia.”
The way he said my name nearly broke me. Nearly.
“Yes or no?”
His lips parted around a breath he didn’t take.
I drew the blade across the skin just above my collarbone. It wasn’t deep—I wasn’t an amateur. It was just enough to open a clean, shallow line where the pulse beat close beneath the skin. Blood welled hot and bright. The scent hit the air.
Then Enzo moved.
One second, he was in the water, rigid with refusal. The next, he surged forward, both hands coming up out of the tub and closing around my hips. Wet. Hot. Unshaking now.
He pulled.
I hit the water astride his lap in a rush of heat and copper and steam, the bath spilling over the rim as his shirt soaked through and sealed itself to my skin.
My thighs bracketed his. His hands locked at my waist. His back hit the tub again, and then one hand came up to cradle my jaw, tilting my head with devastating care until the cut on my neck hovered an inch from his mouth.
His breath shook against my skin.
“Damn you,” he whispered.
I swallowed.
His mouth brushed the blood at my throat, lingering there instead of drinking, close enough that every nerve in my body lit like struck flint.
“Damn you, Nadia.”
“Drink.”
A rough sound moved through him, caught somewhere between restraint and surrender. Then his head lowered, and his mouth found my neck.
The bite wasn’t what I expected.
I’d been around vampires for a hundred and fifty-six years.
I’d seen feedings before—careful, clinical things conducted in private parlors and behind velvet curtains.
Arrangements. Indulgences. Mutually beneficial little court rituals between vampires and their preferred donors, all flushed cheeks and loosened collars and the dreamy, satisfied look of people who’d had too much wine and not enough shame.
I’d thought I knew what was coming. I had never been more wrong.
His lips touched the blood first.
Only his mouth, warm and impossibly careful against the cut I’d opened for him, and the contact alone stole the breath out of me.
His hand tightened at my waist. His other slid to the back of my neck, fingers spreading beneath my wet hair, holding me still with such controlled restraint that I felt the effort of it in every place his body touched mine.
Then the smallest edge of fang grazed the wound.
A seal. A promise. A warning.
His mouth closed over the cut, and the world went sideways.
Heat moved through me in a slow, devastating wave. Pleasure followed it, deep and consuming, pouring from the place his mouth worked at my throat, down through my chest, into my stomach, behind my eyes, between my thighs, until every tight, armored part of me uncurled at once.
My hips moved before I knew I’d told them to. A sound broke from me.
Small. Helpless. Humiliating.
His hand left my jaw and slid down my back, hard and possessive, catching at the curve of my hip. He dragged me closer, and the next pull of his mouth was deeper. Slower. Deliberate.
I felt him everywhere.
The hard line of his body beneath me. The heat of his skin through the water.
The wet linen of his shirt plastered to the top of my legs.
My thighs bracketing his, his hand gripping my hip, his mouth locked to my neck as he drank in long, steady pulls that should have frightened me and instead made every thought in my head go soft and bright and useless.
He was hard beneath me.
There was no mistaking it. No polite fiction to hide behind. The full length of him pressed against my center, and when my body answered—when my hips rolled down against the length of him again—his control cracked.
He groaned into my throat. Low. Wrecked. Unfiltered.
The sound went through me like a blade drawn slow. My hand found the back of his neck. My other fisted in his wet hair. I should have stopped. Should have remembered why we were here, what he was doing, what I had offered and what it had cost both of us to get to this point.
Instead, I held him to me.
His teeth pressed harder against the wound, enough to send a sharp, impossible streak of pleasure down my spine. His hand tightened on my hip, dragging me down again, and the friction of him beneath me turned the heat inside my body into something focused. Something dangerous.
“Enzo—”
He growled against my neck. Into my blood. The sound undid something in me I hadn’t known was tied.