Nadia
The attention changed first. It sharpened. A held breath finally let go.
They were moving up through the pines on Lorenzo’s flank, angling for the road ahead of him.
Not charging. Not rushing. Professional to the last. They were setting the trap exactly where I would have set it: a narrow stretch with trees crowding one side and a washed-out ditch on the other, just enough room for a horse to panic and not nearly enough room for a rider to maneuver cleanly.
They thought I wasn’t watching the pines. They thought wrong.
“Prince Veyne,” I said, low enough that only vampire hearing would catch it. “You’re in a kill box.”
Sugar’s ears flicked back. Lorenzo stilled in the saddle, listening.
“Keep her moving,” I said. “Slow walk. No sudden turn. No hand to your blade until I’m gone. They’re watching your body, not mine.”
His voice came back just as quiet. “How many?”
“One confirmed. Possibly more.”
“Nadia—”
“If you stop, you tell them we know. If you turn, you put Sugar between me and the trees. If you dismount, I have to keep both of you alive on foot in terrain they chose.” I let my hand drift near my dagger.
“Ride through the narrow. Count to twenty. Then you can be as insufferable as you fucking want.”
A beat of silence stretched between us. I felt him do the math. He wouldn’t obey me—never that. No, he was calculating angles, terrain, risk, the same way he’d calculated every battlefield he’d survived for four centuries. He hated the answer. I could feel that, too.
Good.
I hated most correct answers.
“That’s an order from the woman your father trusts to keep you breathing,” I added. “Don’t make me bad at my job.”
His jaw tightened.
Then Sugar took one slow step forward. Then another.
“Twenty,” he said.
It sounded like a promise. It sounded like a threat.
Before he could decide he’d given me enough obedience for one lifetime, I stepped sideways into the shadow of the pines and vanished. The dark took me into the trees, and I came out of a shadow ten feet behind the figure moving up the slope.
Shadow Fae.
I knew it the moment I saw the shape of him—the way he wore the dark, the way he moved through it like it was a second body, the long, lean killer’s economy of someone who’d done this a thousand times.
Not the scout from the alley.
This one was bigger. Older. A blade in each hand, paired and matched, the black braid of Shadow Court enforcement stitched at his cuffs.
An enforcer. A real one.
He felt me the half-second I arrived, because of course he did.
My kind lived in the dark. We wore it, breathed it, knew the smallest changes in it the way other people knew a hand settling on the back of their neck.
The shadow I stepped out of shifted around me, and his head turned before my boot had touched the pine needles.
His blades came up.
For one suspended heartbeat, the woods stilled around us.
Then he moved, and the distance between us collapsed into steel and shadow and the wet, bitter smell of pine bark splitting beneath my shoulder as he drove me sideways into a tree.
He was good in the way only Court-trained killers were, with decades of sanctioned murder carved into muscle and reflex. The scout had given me six seconds and a blade between the ribs.
This one gave me nothing.
His paired blades came in tight, economical arcs, one high and one low, forcing my body to choose which wound it preferred. I caught the first strike on my dagger, twisted away from the second, and took the third across my forearm before I’d fully read the shape of his style.
Pain flashed white.
I dropped into shadow and came out behind him.
He was already there.
Bastard.
His left blade swept back like he’d known exactly where I would land, because he had. Short jumps worked beautifully on people who thought shadows were only darkness. They didn’t work nearly as well on someone who’d been raised in them.
He caught my wrist on his crossguard and drove an elbow into my mouth hard enough to split my lip and knock my skull against a pine trunk. Blood washed over my tongue, hot and bright and deeply inconvenient, and with the cold clarity that only ever came to me when a fight decided to become ugly.
Well. This is going to hurt.
It absolutely did.
We cut through the pine stand in the failing light, flickering in and out of shadows too close together to be useful and too familiar to be safe.
This wasn’t the clean, pretty violence I had shown Lorenzo on the road.
Not three seconds and a blade placed with surgical precision.
This was old blood and old training, two Shadow Fae trading tricks in the dark, both of us knowing where the other would step because we had been taught by the same kind of monsters.
He was bigger than me. Older. Stronger. He had two blades to my one and reach enough to make every opening cost me skin.
One strike scraped fire across my ribs. Another slammed into my side hard enough to crack something that had been perfectly happy uncracked.
A third opened my thigh, deep enough that my leg went hot, then cold, then dangerously unreliable.
I smiled at him through the blood in my teeth.
He didn’t appreciate it.
Good, you miserable fuck.
He pressed harder after that, driving me back through the trees with his blades flashing pale in the copper dusk.
Somewhere down the road, Sugar’s hoofbeats were fading.
Lorenzo was still moving. Still alive. Still doing the tactically correct thing he was absolutely going to be furious about later.
Assuming there is a later.
The enforcer’s mouth curved just a little, and there it was—the mistake.
Arrogance would have been louder, easier to use against him. This was certainty, bone-deep and quiet, sharpened by too many nights ending exactly as he expected: with a body at his feet.
He thought he was going to win.
I had never once survived by thinking I was going to win. Winning was for soldiers with banners and princes with maps and Court enforcers who believed training made them inevitable. I knew better.
Survival was dirtier than winning. Meaner. It bit, cheated, went low when honor went high, and put a blade wherever the body opened.
So I let him drive me back.
I let him herd me toward the deepest shadow at the base of the pines. Let my injured leg drag half a breath too long. Let my dagger dip as if my grip had started to fail.
His eyes narrowed, but he took the bait anyway.
When he came in for the kill, both blades committed to the space where my chest should have been, I wasn’t there.
I dropped low under the arc of his blades, into mud and needles and the narrow, ugly space where reach became useless.
Then I came up inside his guard with both hands on my dagger and drove it beneath his third and fourth rib.
Up. Hard. With all the weight I had left.
The blade found his heart. His breath stopped against my cheek, and for one perfect second, he looked surprised.
They always did, the ones who expected to win.
I held him as he folded out of habit. A falling body made noise, and old habits kept me alive even when no one was close enough to hear him hit the ground.
His blades slipped from his hands into the pine needles. His weight sagged against me. Warm blood soaked through the front of my coat, his and mine together, and his breath rattled once in the dark.
Then he laughed.
A wet, broken little sound.
“Still his knife,” he whispered in dialect.
My fingers tightened on the hilt.
“What?”
His glassy eyes found mine, though I wasn’t entirely sure he was seeing me anymore. Maybe he was looking past me, back to the woman who’d sent him into these woods with his pretty paired blades and his bullshit certainty.
“She said you’d choose him.”
The words landed colder than the evening air as he smiled wide with blood in his teeth.
“She was right.”
Then he was gone.
I let his body drop. This time, I didn’t catch the sound. He hit the earth hard, and the pines swallowed it.
For a moment, I stood alone in the dark with my dagger buried in a dead enforcer’s chest, my own blood running warm down my arm, my ribs, my thigh, and the shadows around me waiting like they wanted to know what I would do next.
I didn’t push him through the deep. I didn’t have that much left in me.
Out here, miles from any village road, the scavengers would do what the deep would have done. Let the earth have him. Let the pines keep him. Let whatever gods watched over Court knives sort through the rest.
She said you’d choose him.
I had known there would be more. I’d known it since the alley, since the cliff, since the road had opened beneath a horse that had carried Lorenzo safely through worse terrain than that. My stepmother didn’t send one knife. She’d never sent just one knife.
She sent knives until the work was done.
But this was worse.
Because she hadn’t sent him only to kill me. She’d sent him to prove she knew exactly where I would put myself when the blade came down. Between Lorenzo and the dark.
I wiped my dagger on the dead enforcer’s coat with hands that had started, finally, to shake.
Ribs: bruised, maybe cracked.
Cut across them: shallow, bleeding, manageable.
Forearm: clean slice.
Thigh: worse.
Lip: split.
Left side: one long, screaming objection to remaining upright.
I’d live. I’d be slow for a week and hurting for two, but I’d live.
I had half a vial of clotting salve in my kit and exactly one pain draught left at the bottom of the bag, and the draught was the cheap kind that took the edge off without doing anything useful about the actual edge.
The salve would knit the shallow cuts by morning and do absolutely fuck all for the thigh, which needed proper witch-work or a needle, and I had a needle.