Nadia
Icame out of sleep like a body breaking the surface of dark water—too fast, too cold, and absolutely certain something was wrong.
The fire had burned down to embers. The clearing was quiet. My ribs throbbed beneath Enzo’s careful wrapping, my thigh was a hot, furious thing under the binding, and the coat pulled around my shoulders was his.
Still his. As if I’d stopped noticing that just because I’d been unconscious. But that wasn’t what woke me.
What woke me was the thing under my ribs losing its entire fucking mind.
A raw, animal alarm that clawed toward the dark beyond camp, because it had apparently decided something belonging within reach had moved too far away. I sat up before I’d fully finished waking.
Across the half-dead fire, his log was empty. His sword was gone. The dark beyond the clearing held itself entirely too still.
“Of course,” I muttered.
Because naturally. Obviously. Gods forbid Lorenzo Veyne experience one emotion without walking into the woods armed and unsupervised. I gave myself precisely one moment to be furious.
Then I got up.
My thigh hated that. Violently. I gritted my teeth through the first bright slice of pain, dragged on my boots, snatched my dagger, and left the firelight before common sense could gather enough votes to stop me.
The trail was easy. Too easy.
He hadn’t bothered to hide it. Boot prints in the soft earth.
A crushed fern at shoulder height where someone tall had brushed through too fast. Pine needles disturbed in the heavy, careless pattern of deliberate carelessness, left by someone who knew how to vanish and had decided, for reasons known only to his emotionally constipated royal ass, not to bother.
Lorenzo Veyne was a four-hundred-year-old vampire prince who’d trained half the army in this province, and he’d left a trail a drunk toddler could follow. Which meant he’d either been in a hurry, or he hadn’t expected anyone to come after him. Both options pissed me off.
So I followed.
I used the shadows where the pines made them deep enough, slipping ahead by short jumps that didn’t pull at my injuries. A hundred yards at a time. Forward and to the side. Low. Quiet. Careful, because whatever had dragged him out of camp might still be waiting in the dark.
The trees thinned, and I heard the water before I saw it—the low, steady rush of a stream grown into something close to a river, moving cold over stone in the dark. I slowed and dropped into the shadow at the base of a pine, reaching ahead through the dark for the shape of whatever waited there.
No second presence. No fighter in cover. No wrongness I could feel from the trees. Just him.
I stepped to the edge of the tree line and looked.
He stood waist-deep in the river. The moon was nearly full, silvering the water where it broke over the stones and turning black where it moved around him. He was naked. Wet. Head tipped back toward the sky like he was asking the gods for patience and getting absolutely none.
Saints save me.
The man was a problem. A tall, moonlit, murder-drenched problem that I wanted to equally lick and punch in the throat.
His hair was wet and pushed back from his face.
His shoulders were drawn in a hard, brutal line I could read even from the trees.
Blood—not his—still marked him in places the river hadn’t finished stealing it: a faint red track along one forearm, a darker smear near his ribs, a thin streak at his jaw where someone had died close enough to cough against his skin.
He’d been washing for a while. He still wasn’t clean. He was just standing there in the cold, half-feral and half-frozen, staring at the moon like he had no intention of returning to the clearing, to the fire, to me, to whatever he’d walked away from.
I absolutely should’ve left.
Unfortunately, I’d never once in my life been accused of doing the sensible thing when a terrible idea was readily available.
The moment I confirmed he was alive, I should’ve gone back to camp. My job didn’t include standing in the trees cataloging the moonlit cut of his back, or the tense line of his shoulders, or the way his hands were fisted at his sides like he was holding himself in the river by force.
It also didn’t include the way my breath had gone shallow. Or the way the thing under my sternum had stopped screaming and started doing something far more dangerous.
Purring, maybe.
The treacherous little shit.
I stayed one breath too long. Long enough for my eyes to adjust. Long enough to see the blood on his arm wasn’t his. Long enough to notice the sword on the bank, his clothes folded carefully on a flat stone, and the deliberate stillness of violence recently finished and not yet washed clean.
He’d killed someone. While I slept. He’d walked out of camp without telling me, without waking me, without giving me a single godsdamned word after spending all day furious that I’d done the same thing to him.
The fury came back hot and clean. Good. I knew what to do with fury.
I shifted my weight to step backward into the shadows and leave before I did something stupid like say his name. A pine needle cracked under my boot.
Then Enzo moved.
One second, he was fifty feet away, waist-deep in silver water. The next, I was on my back in the pine needles with the breath knocked out of me, his weight over mine, and his hand locked around my throat, a weapon before it was a touch.
His other hand pinned my wrist beside my head. His knee braced hard between my thighs. His body covered mine with the kind of efficient violence that made it very clear Lorenzo Veyne hadn’t survived four centuries by waiting to see whether a sound in the dark had friendly intentions.
For one frozen second, he didn’t know me.
I saw it on his face. No prince. No commander. No careful, guilt-ridden bastard who’d bandaged my ribs and put his coat around my shoulders like he had any right to take care of what he’d already hurt.
Just the thing in the dark that killed threats before they became problems.
Then his eyes focused. His hand at my throat stilled.
“Nadia.” My name came out of him like something breaking.
“Usually,” I rasped, because apparently death itself couldn’t cure me of being difficult, “people say hello.”
He released my wrist first. Slowly. Like sudden movement might damage one of us.
Then his hand loosened from my throat, but it didn’t leave. His fingers stayed there for one impossible second, curved lightly against the pulse he’d found by accident and couldn’t seem to stop feeling.
My pulse was making a fucking spectacle of itself.
His wasn’t doing much better. He was above me, naked and wet and dripping cold river water onto my coat. His coat. His body caged mine against the muddy bank, his face close enough that I could see the last traces of blood the river hadn’t taken from the edge of his jaw.
Not his blood.
My anger found its feet before the rest of me did.
“You went hunting.”
His jaw flexed. “You followed me.”
“I woke up and you were gone.”
“You were supposed to stay asleep.”
“And you were supposed to stop making stupid decisions the moment you criticized mine.”
Something moved across his face. Pain, maybe.
Good. Let it hurt.
His touch finally left my throat. He still didn’t move away.
For four seconds, neither of us did anything sensible.
Four seconds of his body over mine. Four seconds of river-cold skin and blood-warm breath.
Four seconds of his gaze dropping to my mouth before he dragged it back up like the movement cost him something.
Four seconds in which my body remembered the bath with humiliating, traitorous precision: his teeth, his hands, the sound he’d made against my throat before he set me aside like a mistake he couldn’t survive making.
Then I shoved at his shoulder.
“Get off me.”
He did. Fast enough to be obedient. Not fast enough to pretend he hadn’t hesitated.
He turned away and crossed the few steps to the flat stone where his clothes were folded.
I lay on my back in the pine needles for the amount of time it took him to pull on his trousers, and I told myself, with every shred of dignity I had left, that I would not remember a single detail of those four seconds.
I was absolutely lying to myself on that front.
I sat up as he turned back to face me.
Bare chest. Wet hair. Trousers low on his hips.
Hands shaking, though he was trying very hard to pretend they weren’t.
He looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read, and I had the sudden, vivid understanding that until five seconds ago, this man hadn’t expected to ever have my body under his hands again.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, his voice rough.
“No.”
“Did I—”
“You didn’t do anything. I’m fine.”
“Nadia, your throat—”
“I said it’s fine, Enzo.”
I hadn’t meant to say his name. It slipped out anyway, stupid and familiar and already between us before I could drag it back by the throat.
His face changed. Barely. Still enough to make me hate myself for noticing.
I got to my feet before either of us could decide what to do with it.
He didn’t offer me a hand. Apparently, the man could learn when sufficiently wounded.
I steadied myself against the nearest trunk and made my thigh remember it still had contractual obligations to the rest of my body.
Then I brushed pine needles off my coat.
His coat. The one I was still wearing. The one I should’ve thrown at his head on principle. Unfortunately, it was warm, and I was angry, not stupid.
“You killed someone,” I said—statement, not question.
His jaw clenched. “Yes.”
“While I was sleeping.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t wake me.”
“No.”
“Enzo.” This time, the name hit harder. Good. “Talk.”
The river moved behind him, silver and black beneath the moon. He stood in front of it bare-chested, wet-haired, blood not quite washed from the inside of one forearm, every inch of him suggesting he’d walked out of camp to commit violence and found the consequences deeply inconvenient.