Enzo #2
All it would take was my hands on her, and my blood on her skin, and her permission.
She’d told me where I could touch her and where I could not.
She’d dropped my shirt at my feet because she wanted nothing of mine left on her body.
A woman who wouldn’t keep my shirt was not a woman who would welcome my blood on her skin, and I was not going to offer it and make her refuse, or worse, make her accept it because she was too wounded to fight me on one more thing.
So I reached for the needle instead.
The slow way. The mundane way. The only way she'd left open to me.
While I stitched her, she didn’t make a single sound.
Gods, how I wished she would.
I wished she would curse at me. Kick me. Tell me I was a bastard again. Anything but that rigid, silent endurance that made me want to put my fist through the nearest tree because I couldn’t put it through the man who’d done this to her.
When I wrapped her thigh, my hands only stayed steady because I ordered them to.
Her skin was warm beneath the blood. Her muscles jumped once under my fingers when the bandage pulled tight, and the thing in my chest answered like it had teeth.
I ignored it.
I ignored the shape of her leg under my hands. The scent of her blood. The memory of her in my lap, wet and shaking, her throat beneath my fangs. I ignored all of it because she’d asked me not to make this another wound, and I’d done enough damage already.
When the binding was finished, I tied it off and took my hands away.
Immediately.
“There,” I said.
She breathed for a long moment with her face turned toward the fire. Then, slowly, painfully, she sat upright and pulled my coat tighter around her shoulders.
She’d noticed it was mine. She kept it anyway. She simply refused to give either of us the mercy of saying so.
“Thank you, Prince Veyne.”
The thanks was real. The title was punishment. I accepted both.
Then I crossed to the other side of the fire, sat on the log, and picked up the blade I didn’t need to clean. I cleaned it anyway. My hands needed something to do that wasn’t reaching for her.
Nadia lasted perhaps ten minutes before sleep took her. She went under wrapped in my coat, her wounded arm tucked close, the bindings I’d done snug beneath the blanket. Her last conscious act was to pull the coat tighter around herself with the hand that still obeyed her.
I watched her do it, pretending I was watching the blade.
The fire burned low. Sugar shifted in the dark. The clearing settled around us, cold and quiet and defensible. I cleaned the blade until there was nothing left to clean. Then I let myself think.
I’d been avoiding it since the bath. Since her blood touched my tongue. Since the recognition landed.
Kieran had warned me.
Three weeks ago, in our father’s library, with a fire between us and Father’s old papers spread across the table, my brother told me what it felt like when the bond first opened.
He hadn't described it as certainty or proof, or some neat little declaration from the gods that this person was yours and the world had rearranged itself accordingly.
He called it a signal. A door. A wrongness turned right so suddenly the mind could mistake it for hunger.
He hadn’t known what it was when it happened to him.
He’d drunk from Merrit, felt the shape of it, and kept going because he hadn’t understood there was a choice to make until the choice had already been made.
By the time he gave her his blood, the bond had finished what neither of them had known it had started.
That was why he’d told me.
“If you ever feel it,” he’d said, “pull back. Pull back before your blood gets involved.”
Before the bond can close around someone who hasn’t been given the truth yet. Before want turns into fate, and everyone involved is left pretending there’s any honor in a choice no one understood they were making. He hated taking Merrit’s choice away, but there was no changing it now.
I had filed the warning away like I filed most warnings: useful, relevant to someone else, unlikely to ever matter to me.
Then Nadia walked into a bathing room with a knife and my shirt on her body and put her blood under my fangs.
And it mattered. Saints, it mattered.
The moment I tasted her, the recognition hit so hard it nearly took the rest of me with it.
It wasn’t certainty—Kieran had been right about that.
But it was close enough to terrify me. Her blood was right—like a key turning in a lock I hadn’t known I’d been carrying inside my ribs for four centuries.
And with my brother’s voice in the back of my head, I understood exactly what was happening.
So I stopped.
Before I gave her my blood. Before the bond could complete. Before Nadia Voss could be tied to me because she was hurt, angry, half-starved of tenderness, and trying to save my life the only way she knew how.
I pulled back. She felt rejection. I felt the most disciplined act of my life tear the heart out of both of us. And everything since had been the cost.
Prince Veyne. The rooftop. The food she refused. The kill in the pines. The way she stepped out of the shadows bleeding and still looked at me like I was the one she needed to survive. The way she said my title like a blade and watched to make sure it went in.
The fire cracked softly between us, and I set the whetstone down. Across from me, Nadia slept in my coat like she hadn’t spent the entire day proving I’d lost the right to put it there.
I believed she was my mate.
I couldn’t know. Not yet. Kieran had been clear about that, too. The bond didn’t confirm itself until both parties drank. Until both chose. Until blood answered blood and the door closed behind them. But I believed it. I believed it with every brutal, inconvenient instinct in me.
And I wouldn’t tell her. Not tonight.
Not while she was wounded. Not while she was angry enough to use my name as a weapon and tired enough to mistake exhaustion for surrender. Not while we were nine days from Tharros with enemies in the trees and my own province rotting from the inside.
I would tell her when she was healed. When she was rested. When she had all the information and enough distance from me to choose without my hunger, my guilt, or my hands anywhere near the scales.
And if she chose to walk away, I would let her.
That was the decision. It had cost me for a day. It would cost me for nine more.
I picked up the blade again.
It still didn’t need cleaning.
I cleaned it, anyway.