Nadia #2
I made a note to restock at the next village with an apothecary worth the name. Good salve. Real pain draughts. The kind of stock a woman bleeding her way across a kingdom ought to keep on hand, and the kind I'd been too busy getting thrown off a cliff and into a bath to replenish.
Lorenzo Veyne was somewhere up the road on a horse, alive, because I had stepped into a shadow and handled the thing he never would have seen in time.
That was the job. I had done the job. So why did it feel like I had lost something, anyway?
I stepped into the shadow at the base of the pines and let it carry me back to the road.
I’d meant to come out clean. Walking. Composed. The cold professional stepping from the dark with the threat handled and nothing on her face.
That was the plan. The plan, as they so often did around me, promptly fucked off into the trees.
I came out of the tree line ten feet behind Sugar, bleeding and shaking, and my injured thigh folded under me the moment I cleared the shadow.
I caught myself on a pine trunk with one hand, bark biting into my palm, and the world tipped hard enough that I had to close one eye to keep it from becoming two worlds.
That was when he saw me.
He’d ridden clear of the narrow stretch.
Of course he had.
He’d counted to twenty. Of course he’d done that, too. Lorenzo Veyne could probably count to twenty while bleeding out, falling off a cliff, and correcting someone’s battlefield formation.
But he hadn’t gone one step farther.
He’d stopped Sugar just beyond the kill box, turned her toward the trees, and waited there with one hand on his blade and every line of his body aimed at the place where I had vanished. Not abandoning me. Not charging in and making himself another problem I had to solve.
Obeying the battlefield math exactly as long as it remained battlefield math and not one second longer.
He saw me come out of the shadow covered in blood.
I watched the sight hit him. Watched the iron control he’d held all day—the control he’d worn while I called him Prince Veyne, while I refused his food, while I turned every soft thing between us into another locked door—crack straight down the middle.
He was off Sugar before I finished stumbling.
“Nadia.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re fucking bleeding.”
He crossed the distance between us in three strides. His hands came up like he meant to catch me, touch me, hold me upright by sheer force of will the way he had on the cliff and in the alley and too many other moments I had been stupid enough to remember.
I stepped back.
His hands stopped in the air between us. A small thing. A brutal thing.
“I’m fine, Prince Veyne.” My voice held. Saints be praised and all that useless shit. “The threat is handled.”
His jaw locked.
“The threat,” he repeated.
Not because he hadn’t known. He’d known enough. I’d given him the shape of it, the kill box, the direction, the order to clear the road.
But now he was looking at the blood soaking my sleeve, the tear in my coat at the ribs, the way my left leg wasn’t taking weight properly, and understanding exactly how much I had left out.
His voice dropped. “Who?”
“A Shadow Fae enforcer.”
Something very old and very dangerous moved behind his eyes.
“An enforcer.”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“One.”
“Confirmed?” he asked, and there it was—the commander, even through the fury. The man who could be gutted open and still ask the right question first.
“Only one engaged.”
His nostrils flared once. “And how long had he been following us?”
I wiped blood from my split lip with the back of my hand. It only made a bigger mess.
Fantastic.
“Since the village.”
The silence that followed wasn’t empty. No, that shit had teeth.
“Since the village,” he growled, his hazel eyes practically glowing with unspent rage.
“Yes.”
“You knew all day.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t say a fucking word.”
“I handled it.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one that matters.”
“No.” The word came out low enough that Sugar shifted behind him, ears flicking back. “It’s the answer you give when you want to make yourself a blade and nothing else.”
My mouth pulled wide in a shit-eating grin. It felt awful on my split lip. “Convenient, then.”
His hands were still half-raised between us. Still wanting to touch. Still hanging in the air where I had refused them. I watched him make himself lower them, watched him curl those hands into fists at his sides like if he didn’t give them orders, they would reach for me, anyway.
Good. Let him learn what restraint cost from this side.
His gaze moved over me again, cataloging damage with terrible precision: ribs, arm, thigh, lip, the way I held my left side, the way one shoulder sat slightly wrong from where the enforcer had driven me into a tree.
Every wound landed somewhere in him. I didn’t let myself care.
“You’re hurt,” he said. Quieter now. Worse. “You’re hurt, and you knew there was a Court enforcer on our backtrail, and you kept that from me. You sent me through the kill box and went into the trees alone.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
There it was at last, dragged out of him raw and unguarded, carrying the same wreckage as the question he had asked in the bath without ever managing to say aloud.
Why.
I was tired. I hurt in six different places. The thing beneath my ribs was screaming, loud enough to drown out everything else, and I had spent the entire night and the entire day holding on by my fingernails.
So I gave him the truth. The cold version with edges sharp enough to hold the line for me.
“Because it’s my job.” My voice came out flat and even, and I was proud of it in the distant, ugly way I was proud of a clean kill. “Your father asked me to keep you alive. Not to keep you informed. Not to keep you company. Not to—”
I stopped.
I didn’t say “not to climb into your bathtub.”
I didn’t say “not to put my throat under your mouth.”
I didn’t say “not to hand you the last soft piece of me and watch you set it aside like it weighed too much.”
I locked all of that down where it belonged.
“To keep you breathing,” I finished. “That’s the job. I’m doing the fucking job.”
His face changed. “That’s not all this is,” he said, voice low and rough. “And you know it.”
“It’s all of it that matters, Prince Veyne.”
“Stop calling me that.” The words came out raw, stripped of polish, command, and every careful piece of princely control.
Stop calling me that.
For one half-second, he was right there in the failing light. Undone. Reaching. Looking at me like the blood on my body was coming out of him, too.
“It’s your name,” I insisted. “It’s your title. It’s what you are to me.”
The words landed exactly where I aimed them. I watched them hit, and I told myself, as the last light drained out of the pines and the cold came down between us, that the twisting thing under my sternum was the feeding.
Or the blood loss.
Or the bruised ribs.
Or the fact that I had just killed one of my own kind in the dark and left him for scavengers.
Anything but the truth. Which was that hurting him hurt me. And I would do it anyway, every single day for the rest of this journey, because it was the only wall I had left, and I wouldn’t let him take it down again.
“We should make camp,” I said into the silence. “I need to dress these. You should eat. We’ve got nine days to Tharros, and I’d like to spend as few of them bleeding as possible.”
He didn’t answer for a long moment. When he did, his voice had gone flat and careful and closed. The door came down on his side now, too.
Finally.
“There’s a clearing a quarter mile ahead,” he said. “Defensible. Water nearby.”
“Good.”
He turned and gathered Sugar’s reins. He didn’t offer to help me walk. For one stupid, aching second, I thought he’d learned. Then he brought Sugar around, stepped into my path, and stared at my leg.
“No.”
I blinked at him. “Excuse me?”
“You’re not walking on that.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding through your leathers.”
“It’s decorative.”
His eyes lifted to mine. No softness there. No pleading. No careful hand offered for me to reject. Just Prince Lorenzo Veyne, military commander, looking at an injured asset on a road that still had teeth.
“Get on the fucking horse.”
“No.”
His jaw flexed once. Then he moved.
I had half a second to curse before his hands closed around my waist and lifted me with brisk, infuriating efficiency, as if I were a problem with a simple solution and he'd lost patience with everyone pretending otherwise.
“Put me down.”
“I am.”
He set me on the saddle. Sugar, traitorous nightmare beast that she was, stood perfectly still.
I stared down at him, furious enough to forget for one blessed moment that my thigh was trying to detach from my body.
“You don’t get to do that.”
“I just did.”
“Enzo—”
His eyes flashed, less at the name itself than the fact that I had used it. For one breath, something moved between us before he shut it down so hard I almost heard the door close.
“You can hate me from the saddle,” he said. “You’re not bleeding your way to camp to prove a point.”
“I wasn’t proving a point.”
“You were proving several. Perfectly.”
I opened my mouth. Nothing useful came out.
He turned away before I could find something sharp enough to throw at him, took Sugar’s reins, and started toward the clearing.
I sat on the horse with blood cooling on my thigh, fury hot behind my teeth, and the deeply inconvenient knowledge that he was right.
The bastard.