Enzo
Across the clearing, Nadia slept wrapped in my coat, with one hand curled near her face, looking smaller than she had any right to after cutting down a Court enforcer and nearly bleeding through my saddle out of spite.
The pull beneath my sternum dragged toward her with every breath. Bond. Signal. Suspicion. Whatever name I gave it, it wanted me across the fire.
I stayed where I was.
Then I heard the second knife coming.
A careful shift in the trees beyond the perimeter, too controlled to be an animal and too quiet to be a villager. He was good. He’d taken the long way around to the high side of camp, moving slowly enough that even a vampire might’ve missed him.
If that vampire hadn’t been waiting. I had been.
The one Nadia killed in the pines had been the first wave. She hadn’t said there would be more, but she hadn’t needed to. That was how this kind of work went. You didn’t send one blade and hope. You sent knives until the body stopped moving.
I stood from the log and sheathed the blade I’d been cleaning.
Nadia didn’t stir.
I crossed to her anyway, crouching beside the bedroll long enough to make sure sleep still held her. Hers was the heavy, ugly kind a body took when pain and blood loss finally dragged it under by the throat.
My coat had slipped off one shoulder. I pulled it back into place before I could stop myself.
Then I picked up my sword, walked out of the firelight, and went to handle it the same way she had handled hers.
Alone. In the dark. Without a word.
I knew, even as I stepped beneath the pines, that this was the version of me she would least forgive. The version that matched her cold for cold. The version that had learned the lesson she spent all day teaching and decided to be an excellent student.
I told myself it was tactical.
She was wounded. Exhausted. In no state to fight another Court blade. Letting her sleep was the only useful thing I could do for her, and I was a prince, a commander. I didn’t need Nadia Voss to handle one assassin in the pines of my own province.
All true.
But it wasn’t the reason.
The reason was uglier.
She had kept the first threat from me. She’d gone into the dark alone, come back bleeding, and called it the job. She had used silence like a blade and driven it exactly where she wanted it.
Fine.
Tonight, I’d use silence, too.
She’d wake in the morning and find a second body in the trees. She’d understand I had matched her. She’d understand what it cost when one of us decided the other no longer deserved the truth.
It was cruel. I knew that.
Apparently, I was going to be cruel tonight.
The sword in my hand didn’t object.
He came at me from a poor angle, which surprised me.
After the enforcer in the pines, I’d expected better.
This one was younger. Faster, perhaps, but less disciplined.
Visibly Shadow Fae in the moonlight—slim, cloaked in darkness, moving with the lean economy of a hired knife who’d learned enough to be dangerous and not enough to know when he was outmatched.
No paired blades. No black braid at the cuffs. Not Court enforcement, then. Interesting.
She had killed the enforcer they’d sent first. This one had been sent to clean up what was left. He came over the high side of the rise expecting a wounded woman, a sleeping prince, and a camp too tired to know death had entered it.
What he found was me.
Four centuries old, armed, awake, and in a very poor mood.
I let him come within ten feet because I wanted answers more than I wanted a clean kill. He lunged from the trees, blade low, body angled toward the bedroll where Nadia slept.
That decided several things for me.
I cut through his thigh on the first pass, shallow enough to leave him alive and deep enough to drop him. He hit the dirt with a sharp breath, and I was on him before he could roll, one knee pinning his sword arm, my hand locked around his throat, the edge of my blade resting just beneath his ribs.
In the firelit dark, his eyes found mine. Horror dawned slowly.
Good.
“You’re going to tell me,” I said in his language, quiet enough that Nadia wouldn’t wake and clear enough that he’d understand every word, “who sent you.”
He said nothing.
I tightened my hand around his throat. “Try again.”
He laughed. Small. Wet. Already afraid, though he was doing a decent job pretending otherwise. “You think I’m the only one tonight, my prince?”
I loosened my grip enough to let him breathe. “Talk.”
“There are two more teams between here and Tharros.” His voice scraped under my hand. “Same brief. Same targets. The prince and the Shadow Fae traveling with him.”
His gaze flicked past me, toward the faint glow of the fire through the trees. Toward her.
Something in me went very still.
He smiled. “You’ve been carrying Venchenya across half the kingdom, and you still don’t know.”
The word hit harder than it should have.
Venchenya.
I knew it.
Forty years ago, I’d spent six months hunting down a Shadow Fae linguistics text and another six mastering it because powerful people were always most honest in the languages they assumed you didn’t understand.
I’d learned court terms first. Titles. Bloodlines.
Succession language. The words most likely to get a man killed if he misunderstood them.
Venchenya.
She of the crown.
Not princess, exactly. Not in the clean, public way vampire courts used the word. The Shadow Court had older language for older things.
Female heir. Direct line. A woman with a claim.
Nadia.
The world narrowed to the hand I had on his throat and the woman sleeping behind me. I didn’t let my face change.
“Say it again.”
His smile widened, blood on his teeth now. He knew he struck something. The little fool was proud of it.
“Venchenya,” he whispered. “The Court cut her loose. Sealed the door and left her running on surface shadows and spite.”
The door. The sealed place. The deep.
For one breath, the forest around us disappeared.
I saw her hand pressed flat to a wall in the firelight. The way she came back from the shadows too pale. The cold that had taken her after the alley. The tremor she had hidden after dragging me back from the cliff. Every moment I had mistaken the cost for the difficulty of the work itself.
But the work hadn't simply been difficult.
She'd been crippled.
She'd been operating cut off from the source of her own power through the village, the cliff, the enforcer in the pines.
Through me.
Saints.
The assassin mistook my silence for ignorance and kept talking.
“You think she’s dangerous now?” His laugh turned rough when my grip tightened. “You should’ve seen her before they sealed her out.”
Before. Before the woman who’d pulled me from a fall, killed a Court enforcer twice her size, and walked a road bleeding because she refused to ask for help. Before that.
My hand tightened on his throat until his breath hitched. “Who gave the order?”
His eyes glittered in the moonlight. “You know who.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“Then she hasn’t told you.” His smile sharpened. “How sweet.”
I lowered my face closer to his. “Name.”
His smile trembled, but it held. “I was given Mardek Vorlin. Tharros. Handler, not principal.”
A Tharros name. The night narrowed around it. “Handler for whom?”
“The principal stays out of the work.”
“Shadow Court?”
His mouth curved. “Among other interested parties.”
That was enough.
It wasn’t enough to understand the whole board, but enough to know there was one. Enough to know Nadia’s court and my province had lines crossing in the dark, and that someone had been moving pieces on both sides long before we found the first body on the road.
“Who ordered her severed from the deep?”
His smile widened again. A dying man’s last pleasure: finding the wound and pressing.
“The daughter is harder to kill than the mother was,” he said softly. “They told us she would be.”
Everything in me went quiet. My hand tightened on his throat.
He saw it. He was dying, not stupid, and there was enough cruelty left in him to use what he’d found.
“The mother went quiet enough.” Blood slid over his bottom lip as he smiled. “We’d hoped this one would do the same.”
The mother went quiet enough.
I didn’t, in the ordinary course of things, lose my temper. Not in battle. Not in council. Not in interrogation. Rage was a luxury commanders couldn’t afford, and I’d spent four centuries teaching myself to put it somewhere useful before it put me somewhere stupid.
But the words sat there in the dark between us.
Nadia’s mother went quiet enough.
Nadia, bleeding by my fire. Nadia, cut off from her own power, hunted by her own court, carrying a dead woman’s name in the shape of every wall she ever built around herself.
The assassin opened his mouth again. I didn’t let him use it. My sword moved before discipline could catch it.
His throat opened beneath my blade, and because I was close—too close, close enough to see the surprise break across his face—the blood came hot and hard across my hand, my shirt, my throat, my jaw.
He choked once.
I caught him by the front of his cloak and held him there while he died, my face inches from his, his blood spilling over my knuckles and down the blade in dark, pulsing sheets.
The forest held its breath. So did I.
His body jerked once. Then went slack.
I stayed there, crouched in the pine dark with his blood cooling on my skin and my hand still fisted in his cloak, and I understood, with absolute clarity, that I hadn’t killed him because he was useful dead.
I’d killed him because he’d spoken of Nadia’s mother like she’d been an errand completed.
For one unguarded moment, I had wanted him afraid before he went.
He had been. Just not enough.
The pines went quiet around us as I let his body drop from my shaking hands. His blood was everywhere. Down my shirt. Across my chest. Inside my forearms. Along my jaw where he’d choked and coughed and emptied himself against me. My sword was dark with it.
And he’d died before I was finished with him.