Enzo #2
Before I had the name behind the Shadow Court handler. Before I knew who’d given the order on Nadia’s mother. Before I’d pulled every useful thread out of him and left nothing but meat for the scavengers.
I’d killed him because I hadn’t been able to listen to one more sentence about her from a mouth that should never have known her name.
I stood in the dark with his blood cooling on my skin and understood, with absolute clarity, that I had let her cost me my discipline. Four centuries of control, and I had broken it in one minute because a hired blade had spoken of Nadia’s mother in dialect.
Apparently, I was considerably less in command of myself than I’d been pretending.
I couldn’t go back to camp like this.
I left the body where it had fallen. The forest would take him. The scavengers would do what scavengers did. I had no interest in giving him more dignity than he’d given the dead woman whose name I still didn’t know.
The stream widened into something close to a river a quarter mile upslope, where the bank dropped low and the water ran clean over flat stones. I’d washed here before. I knew the depth. I knew the cold.
I stripped at the bank. Coat. Shirt. Belt. Trousers. All of it folded on the rocks with more care than I felt. Then I stepped into the water.
The cold hit my legs first. Then my hips. Then my chest. It drove the breath out of me cleanly enough that for one blessed second, there was no rage. No connection. No dead assassin. No woman bleeding in my camp wrapped in my coat. Only cold.
I ducked under. When I came up, I scrubbed the blood from my arms, my chest, my throat, my hair. The water took it in dark ribbons, pulled it downstream, thinned it to nothing over the stones.
My hands stopped shaking eventually, but only because the cold gave them no choice. I stood chest-deep in the river beneath a moon two days from full and tried, for the first time since I had stepped into the bathing chamber last night, to think clearly.
It went south fast.
Nadia’s mother. I had no name for her. No face. Nothing but a dying killer’s smile and the implication that there had been a woman before Nadia who’d been hunted by the same knives and hadn’t survived them.
The mother went quiet enough.
Nadia had a mother. Nadia had a dead mother. Nadia had a mother whose murderers had been disappointed by how lethal the daughter turned out to be. I had been on the road with a woman whose family had been hunted for at least a generation, and I hadn’t known.
I had been on the road with Venchenya of the Shadow Court, and I hadn’t known. I had been on the road with a woman operating at a fraction of her power because her own court had sealed her out of the deep, and I hadn’t known.
And my father had sent her.
My father, who knew too much. My father, who’d spent a thousand years building an intelligence network out of favors, secrets, old blood, and older debts. My father, who’d looked me in the face and told me he was sending the only person he trusted to keep me alive.
He’d known.
He had to have known.
There was no version of the king I knew who would send a Shadow Fae mercenary on a multi-week ride with his son without knowing exactly who she was. Not unless age had finally dulled him, and my father had shown no signs of becoming merciful enough for senility.
He’d known she was Venchenya. He’d known the deep was sealed. He’d known, almost certainly, that the Shadow Court had been trying to erase her long before she ever crossed my path.
And he’d said nothing.
Why?
There were a great many possible answers. I discarded most of them before the river had finished dragging the warmth from my bones.
He'd wanted me to find out without the title between us, without a file or warning or the political weight of Shadow Heir sitting on every word she spoke and every choice I made around her.
He'd wanted me to meet Nadia first. Venchenya after.
That sounded like him.
So did the rest of it: the journey, the proximity, the forced reliance, the absolute necessity of putting my life in her hands and hers, eventually, in mine.
The bond he couldn’t possibly have planned. Everything else, I was no longer certain.
I'd write to him the moment I reached a sending stone. I'd demand to know what he knew, when he knew it, and what in all the godsdamned realms he thought he was doing sending me into Tharros with the Venchenya of the fucking Shadow Court, without one word about what she carried or what hunted her.
But I wouldn't tell Nadia I knew. Not about Venchenya. Not about the deep. Not about her mother.
None of what I had learned tonight was mine to use. Her bloodline was hers. Her exile was hers. Her dead were hers. The only honest thing I could do with the knowledge was hold it until she chose to give it to me herself.
If she ever did. If she ever forgave me enough to give me anything again.
I closed my eyes and let the river move around me. The pull under my breastbone didn’t lessen. If anything, it sharpened.
Nadia was back in the clearing, asleep in my coat, one hand curled near her face. Wounded. Furious. Alive.
The bond—or the signal, or the suspicion, or whatever bullshit name I was allowed to give the thing before completion made it fact—pulled toward her with steady, merciless certainty.
I stayed in the river. I stayed, because if I went back now, with everything I’d learned and everything I’d failed to hold, I didn’t trust myself to wear the iron well enough.
I had made three decisions in the water.
I wouldn’t tell her what I suspected about the bond. Not while she was hurt. Not while she was angry. Not until she had the truth and the freedom to choose what came next. I wouldn’t tell her I knew about Venchenya. Her truth. Her time. I would write to my father.
Beneath those decisions was another one—one I wasn’t ready to name.
The bond hadn’t made me care for her. It hadn’t made me watch the way she moved through shadows or notice the sound she made when she was trying not to hurt, or learn the shape of her fury well enough to know when it was hiding fear.
It hadn’t made me trust her with my life on the road.
It hadn’t made me want to put myself between her and every knife the Shadow Court sent.
The bond hadn’t chosen her for me. I had done that. I had been doing it for days. One small choice at a time.
I tipped my head back and stared at the moon through the pines.
Whatever name came after that could wait. It would have to.
I stayed in the cold until I could feel the iron settle back into place. Until the rage cooled. Until my hands were steady and my face could be made into something she wouldn’t read the moment I stepped back into the clearing.
The pull under my breastbone remained.
Steady. Insistent. Hers.
I didn’t go back yet. I stood in the water and held the line one second longer. Then another. Then another.
The way she’d taught me.