Nadia #2
“There were more knives in the forest,” he said at last, voice rough and controlled in the way that meant nothing about him was controlled at all. “I heard the second one coming. I handled it.”
“Handled it?”
“He’s dead in the thicket north of camp.”
“Lovely. Very communicative of you.”
His eyes sharpened. “You were unconscious.”
“I was asleep.”
“You were bleeding through fresh bandages and sleeping like your body had dragged you under by force.”
“How poetic.”
“Nadia.”
“Names,” I snapped.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. Good. Let him be angry. I was fucking delighted to have the company.
“Mardek Vorlin,” he said. “Tharros. Handler, not the principal behind all this mess.”
That cut through the rest. Tharros. The actual problem I’d been tasked to solve.
“How many more?”
“He said two teams between us and Tharros. Maybe more by now since he won’t be reporting in.”
“What else?”
Enzo’s face closed down. It wasn’t silence, exactly. It was something worse, a held thing. A door closing gently enough that I was supposed to pretend I hadn’t heard the latch.
I tilted my head. “That’s all?”
“It’s what matters for now.”
Oh. There it was. Not a lie. No, it was too careful for that. I’d been raised by people who could make a blade out of omission and call it mercy.
My mouth curved before I could stop it. Small. Cold. Mean enough to feel useful. “Did he tell you where the crown jewels are, too?”
Enzo stilled like a man who’d just stepped on a tripwire and decided the safest thing to do was bleed quietly.
So, the dead man had said something about me. Something royal, apparently, or close enough that my blind shot hit bone.
The bastard knew something, and he wasn’t going to tell me.
Fine.
I’d been raised in a court. I knew what to do with men who kept my own truths in their pockets. You banked it. You filed it. You smiled like it didn’t matter, counted the cards they thought they’d hidden up their sleeves, and made them pay later with interest.
“All right,” I murmured. “Then we should get back to camp. We’ve got a long ride tomorrow, and I’d rather not start it by collapsing dramatically in the mud.”
I turned and started through the pines before he could answer. I heard him behind me gathering his shirt, his belt, his sword. Heard the careful tread of him through the dark, ten feet back, giving me space like distance was the one thing he still knew how to offer without making everything worse.
We didn’t speak again.
At camp, I lay down on the bedroll and pulled his coat over me.
His coat.
His coat.
His fucking coat.
I wasn’t giving him the satisfaction of watching me reject it, and I wasn’t freezing my ass off to prove a point I’d already proved beautifully several times today.
Across the fire, Enzo sat on his log. For a moment, I thought he’d reach for that stupid blade again—the one he cleaned when he didn’t know what to do with his hands.
He didn’t. He braced his forearms on his knees instead, clasped his hands together, and stared into the embers like they owed him answers.
They apparently disappointed him.
And neither of us slept.
The next three days tested my patience, my will, and my ability to refrain from smashing his stupid, repressed head into the nearest available rock.
We rode badly, mostly.
Sugar had decided to become a saint at the least convenient time, which meant the problem wasn't the horse. The problem was the cold war between me and Lorenzo Veyne developing a leak while neither of us acknowledged the water rising around our ankles.
He kept his face iron. I kept my voice flat. He kept his hands to himself. I kept my eyes on the road, the trees, the storm-torn country between us and Tharros—anything except the careful inch of space he maintained behind me in the saddle.
One inch.
The man had four centuries of military discipline and was apparently using every last year of it to avoid letting his chest touch my back.
Rude, honestly. Also effective.
Unfortunately.
My thigh improved slowly, with no help from anything more magical than common salve and the pain draught I finally took on the second morning, when standing became more of a rumor than a skill.
The cracked rib stopped grinding when I breathed, the cut along my side scabbed clean, and the deep slice in my thigh stopped bleeding through the wraps Lorenzo replaced every morning with hands so careful and impersonal it would have been kinder if he had spat in my face.
I wouldn’t have flinched if he’d spat in my face.
I flinched every time his fingers brushed the inside of my knee.
We stopped twice for water. Once for grain. He left bread where I’d find it without having to accept it from his hand, and I ate it without acknowledging where it came from because I was still angry, not suicidal.
I scouted ahead when the shadows allowed it and walked the long stretches when they didn’t.
The pull toward him didn't let up, not once in two days of walking, and somewhere in the cold middle hours of the second night, I accepted that I was probably going to be carrying it for the rest of my unnaturally long life.
I made that future-Nadia’s problem.
She was going to be up to her ass in problems soon enough.
By late afternoon on the third day, the road climbed out of the lowlands and into the long, ridged hills marking the eastern edge of Tharros.
I knew we were close before he said anything, but he didn’t have to. His body changed—the set of his shoulders, the angle of his attention, the way he held the reins, not tighter exactly, but with a familiarity that had weight to it. This wasn’t a man watching the road anymore.
This was a man returning to his own land.
And then we crested the ridge.
There should have been a town where the valley opened below us.
A small one, built where two trade roads met. Stone houses. Slate roofs. A witch’s hall with a narrow spire. A market square with a fountain at its heart. A sending tower at the far end where the road climbed again toward the hills. There should have been chimney smoke and laundry lines.