Nadia
The stable roof was cold, slanted, and deeply committed to making itself my problem.
Fine.
I had spent too many years becoming the kind of woman a bad roof, a worse night, and a vampire prince with devastating hands could not touch. A bullshit roof in a nowhere town wouldn’t stop me.
I hadn’t actually climbed onto the roof like an idiot.
The stable roof met the inn’s rear gable in a narrow, shadowed seam beneath the eaves, the kind of place rain forgot to touch directly, and sensible people forgot to look.
I folded myself into that dark angle with my coat pulled tight and the shadows drawn close around me, less like a blanket than a warning.
Cold still found me but only at the edges. Twenty feet below and to the left, the corner suite’s window glowed faintly against the dark.
I watched it.
I did the work.
The thing beneath my sternum pulled toward that window with a steady, animal insistence I had no interest in examining. I’d been ignoring it since I walked out of the room. I would continue ignoring it until it developed manners, died of neglect, or became someone else’s problem.
This was the feeding. That was all.
Bodies did strange things after a vampire fed from them. I’d heard that from men with far more experience and far less shame than me. So this was that. A reaction. A consequence. Blood and magic and whatever vicious little trick vampire mouths played on the body once they had it open.
Not anything else.
And I believed it. Mostly.
Around me, the inn slept. Below me, Lorenzo Veyne was probably in the bed I’d walked away from, sleeping as if he’d gotten what he needed and put the rest of it neatly out of reach.
Good for him.
I refused to wonder whether he’d drained the bath.
Whether he’d picked up the shirt I’d dropped at his feet.
Whether he’d looked at the door after it closed.
Whether he’d cared.
Instead, I took down every soft thing he’d talked me into carrying and put it back where it belonged.
His hand at the small of my back. Gone.
His body behind mine on Sugar. Gone.
The weight of his arms around me in that hunting cabin. The sound of his voice against my hair. The way he’d said my name like it meant something before he made very sure I remembered it didn’t.
Gone. Gone. Gone.
And Enzo.
That name, given freely on the broken edge of a road with mud beneath my knees and his kiss still warm on my mouth. That one took longer. I bricked it in anyway.
I worked through the dark hours methodically, the way I’d been taught to clear a room before sleeping in it. Every entrance. Every shadow. Every place a blade could hide. Every foolish, fragile thing I’d let him do to me this week.
I put all of it on the other side of a door I wouldn’t be opening again.
By the time the sky began to gray in the east, I was no longer the woman who’d walked out of that room.
I was colder. Older. Sharper in all the familiar places.
The woman his father had hired. The unseen knife in the dark.
The one who didn’t climb into baths with offerings.
The one who didn’t mistake hunger for tenderness or restraint for care.
I would stay that way for the remaining nine days of this journey if it fucking killed me.
The pull suggested it was prepared to try.
That was future-Nadia’s problem.
The shadows carried me down from the roof into the gray dawn. I slipped into the stable, pulled Sugar’s tack from the wall, and woke her gently.
By the time the kitchen door opened and Lorenzo Veyne stepped into the yard, Sugar was saddled, most of my blades were checked, and I stood beneath the lantern looking exactly like the woman his father had hired.
Most of my blades. Not all. The empty sheath at my hip had been screaming at me for the last ten minutes. I’d left the dagger behind.
My favorite dagger.
The one I’d worn against my skin since I was sixteen.
The one I had carried into the bath like a threat, like an offering, like a fucking idiot.
I’d dropped it on the wet stone floor when I no longer needed it, and then I had walked out with my pride in pieces and forgotten to take the damn thing with me.
Fantastic.
Really excellent work.
He stopped in the doorway.
His hair was damp. He was dressed. His face had been put back together in the cold, careful way I’d seen him do it at the cliff edge, all the broken parts tucked behind bone and discipline and whatever bullshit men like him called honor when they didn’t want to call it fear.
In his hand was my dagger.
Clean. Dry. Held flat across his palm, hilt turned toward me. The sight of it hit harder than it had any right to. He crossed the yard without a word and offered it to me.
I took it. Our fingers didn’t touch. I made very sure of that.
“Prince Veyne,” I said, my voice coming out level. Flat. Empty enough to echo. “The horse is ready when you are.”
Something moved across his face—small, fast, gone before anyone who hadn’t spent the last week learning the infuriating details of him would have caught it. A ghost of a flinch at the corner of his jaw. A faint tightening around the eyes.
I filed the satisfaction of causing it somewhere dark and ugly.
“Nadia,” he replied softly, gently, and it was so much worse than if he’d yelled it.
I slid my missing blade back into its sheath. “I’ll be scouting on foot today.”
The stable yard went very still around us. Even Sugar, traitor that she was, stopped pretending the bridle required her full attention.
Lorenzo stepped closer. “Absolutely not.”
I smiled without letting any of it reach my eyes. “That sounded like an order.”
“It was a statement.”
“Convenient. Mine was, too.” I tightened the strap across my chest and checked the angle of the dagger at my hip. “One of us needs to be free to move. The road’s still bad, and we don’t know what the storm shook loose. You ride. I’ll cover the flanks and the backtrail.”
“You shadow-walked twice in two days,” he said, voice controlled in a way that made me want to throw something sharp at him. “You spent the night out. You should ride.”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s not—”
“It’s what I’m telling you, Prince Veyne.”
There it was. The phrase landed between us with teeth.
I had said that exact thing to him on the road two days ago, and he hadn’t let me hide behind it. He’d cornered me. Pushed. Threatened. Made me look at him when I didn’t want to.
He didn’t push now.
I watched him decide not to. I watched him understand, in the space of one breath, that the road we’d been on two days ago was gone.
That the woman who’d let him corner her in the rain had walked out of a bathing chamber last night and left something soft and stupid bleeding on the floor behind her.
His jaw worked once, his gaze moving over my face, searching for a crack, a handle, a way in. All he found was a locked door.
“All right,” he said quietly.
The quiet almost did more damage than the arguing would have. Almost.
“Good.”
I turned and walked out of the lantern light into the gray morning, and I didn’t look back. I didn’t need to. A moment later, Sugar’s hooves started after me.
We left Maeven’s Hollow as the sun cleared the eastern hills, him on Sugar at a walk, me ranging ahead and to the side on foot.
The village fell away behind us in a scatter of chimney smoke and wet rooftops.
Ahead, the road crawled through storm-torn country, all slick mud, broken branches, and washed-out gullies waiting to snap an ankle if the gods were bored.
I dropped into shadows when the terrain allowed and came out a hundred yards ahead, scouting the road, the trees, the ditches, the long raw scars where the storm had ripped the world open and left it to bleed mud.
The short jumps cost me nothing.
That was the thing he’d never understand about what I did. He saw the aftereffects of heavy use—the body pulled back from a cliff, the corpse shoved through a sealed door, the impossible pieces that made men whisper and cross themselves—and he assumed all of it hurt like that.
It didn’t.
A short flicker from one shadow to another was as easy as walking. Easier, most days. The dark took me in, carried me the length of a held breath, and set me down on the other side with all the fuss of a door opening in a house that already knew my name.
I could do it all day. I had done it all day, on jobs, for years.
The deep was different. The deep cost.
Anything that touched the locked door, the sealed place, the home that wouldn’t answer—that was where the blood came due. That was the kind of working that had nearly killed me twice now, and I was staying the fuck away from it today.
Because I had a job to do.
A man to keep alive.
And absolutely no intention of ending up on my back in the dirt when whatever was following us finally decided to close the distance.
Because something was following us.
I’d felt it the moment we cleared the village—a wrongness in the shadows along the backtrail, a patient little prickle of attention that had no business being there unless someone had put it there on purpose.
I knew that feeling. I’d spent over a hundred years being that feeling to other people.
Someone was back there. Keeping distance.
Matching pace. Moving through cover with the kind of patience that didn’t belong to amateurs, drunk bandits, or idiots with more ambition than skill.
This was professional work. Careful work.
The sort of work that waited until a target was tired, isolated, bleeding, or stupid enough to think they weren’t being watched.
Unfortunately for whoever was back there, I was tired, isolated, and bleeding in several places that didn’t show. What I was not, was stupid.
I confirmed it twice before noon. Dropped into a roadside shadow and reached back along the trail, letting the dark carry my attention over wet earth and broken branches and the thin places where last night’s storm had torn open the road.
There. A presence—deliberate, controlled—holding the same distance every time I checked. Not closing in. Not yet.
Just following.
Waiting.
Which meant one of three things: they’d been told to confirm our route before making a move, they were waiting for the best place to take us, or they weren’t alone and the rest of them hadn’t caught up yet.
All delightful options. Very charming.
What I did not do was tell Lorenzo. I told myself it was tactical.
I didn’t have enough information. Telling him would alter his behavior. Altered behavior might tell our shadow we’d made them. The smart play was to let them think they were still invisible while I gathered enough information to decide whether I wanted to question them, kill them, or get creative.
All true. But not the reason. The reason was that telling him would require treating him like a partner, and I no longer had one of those.
I had a principal. A protectee. A job with a heartbeat and a stupidly perfect jaw, who I would keep alive because I’d given his father my word and because, apparently, I was still making poor choices despite my best efforts.
But I wouldn’t give him more than the mission required.
Not my thoughts. Not my fears. Not my softness.
Not one single bloody inch of the places he’d already put his hands, his mouth, his teeth, and then decided to hand back like they’d been inconvenient luggage.
The last time I’d let him know what was happening inside me, he’d taken what he needed and set me at the far end of a bathtub.
Lesson learned. I worked for his father. I would report to his father.
Prince Veyne would find out there had been a threat when the threat was bleeding on the road in front of him, and not one second before.
He tried to reach me twice that morning.
The first time came around midmorning, when the road widened and Sugar drew up beside me where I walked. He didn’t speak at first. Just rode at my pace, quiet and tall and infuriatingly present, his shadow stretching across the rutted road until it brushed the toe of my boot.
“You’re limping,” he said finally.
The man could miss an entire emotional disaster of his own making, apparently, but gods forbid my left foot hit the road wrong.
“I’m not.”
“Your left side,” he said. “You’re favoring it.”
“Bruise from the fall yesterday. It’s nothing.”
“Nadia—”
“Prince Veyne.”
The name cut clean through whatever softness he’d been trying to put between us. Good.
I kept my eyes on the tree line, on the ditch, on the shadows pooling thick beneath the storm-bent branches. Anywhere but up. Anywhere but at him.
“I’m doing my job,” I said. “You don’t need to narrate my body back to me. I know what it’s doing.”
The silence that followed had edges. I could feel him above me, still in the saddle. Too quiet. Too careful. Trying, maybe, to find the place we’d been before last night.
There wasn’t one.
Then, very quietly, he said, “I know you do.”
The worst part was that I believed him. The worse part was that I wanted it to matter. I made sure it didn’t show.
Sugar slowed half a step, like the traitorous beast had an opinion about the conversation. Lorenzo let her drift back. He didn’t push.
Coward, said the ugly little part of me that wanted him to.
The second time was past noon, when we stopped to rest Sugar and eat something cold from the supplies the inn had packed. I stayed on my feet, a few paces away from him, watching the trees and pretending the back of my neck wasn’t crawling.
He held out a strip of dried meat without a word.
Just that.
A piece of food between two fingers. An ordinary offer. Small. Thoughtless in the way care became thoughtless when someone had been doing it for days and didn’t know how to stop.
I looked at his hand. At the food. At the easy, quiet habit of him trying to take care of me like he hadn’t gutted me in a bathtub and then acted surprised there was blood.
“I have my own,” I said, and his hand lowered. Then I turned back to the trees.
Behind me, he exhaled slowly, controlled enough to hide the hurt and not quite enough to erase it, as if he had simply added another small wound to the stack.
I told myself I didn’t hear it, but lying to myself was getting harder.
Everything in me strained toward him, but I held the line—the same way he'd held the line in the rain two days ago when he wouldn't look back at me.
I understood it now, that discipline. I understood exactly what it cost and exactly why a person did it, anyway.
You held the line one second at a time because the alternative was worse.
You held it, because if you let go for even an instant, you'd lose the whole war.
By late afternoon, the light had thinned to beaten copper. The pines along the road threw long, dark fingers across the mud, and the shadows between their trunks deepened into something thick enough to hide teeth.
That was when the follower shifted.
Finally.
I’d been in a foul mood all damn day, and someone had just volunteered to bleed for it.