Enzo #2
I wasn’t afraid to die. Not then. I was afraid to leave her bleeding behind a wall with a witch still breathing somewhere in my town.
“Nadia—”
Shadow caught the vampire around the throat. It wasn’t the beautiful, terrible construction she’d made in the square. It was thinner than that. Ragged. Drawn out of the ash beneath us like she’d reached into an empty well and torn up whatever darkness remained by force.
It wrapped his neck once. Twisted. The vampire made one choking sound before his throat collapsed under it. His body went limp on top of mine.
I shoved him aside and rolled toward her.
She shouldn’t have had anything left. She’d found enough anyway. For me.
I crawled the few feet between us because my thigh still refused to take my weight and my shoulder hadn’t finished knitting closed. Blood smeared beneath my palm. I didn’t know whose anymore.
“Nadia.”
She was on her side where I had left her, one hand pressed weakly against her thigh. Blood seeped between her fingers, too much and too fast. Her face had gone almost gray beneath the soot, her lips bloodless, her lashes heavy.
I got my hand under her head.
“Nadia. Look at me.”
Her eyes opened slowly.
The inky color I’d thought was black was washed a pale green. Gold still burned at the edges, but faintly now, like embers after a fire had eaten everything else.
“Witch,” she whispered. “Still out there.”
“I know.”
“And one more.” Her breath hitched, but her eyes stayed fixed beyond the wall. “Holding back. Hasn’t moved once.”
I looked toward the ruined buildings beyond the smoke.
A witch still waiting to spend her power and one unknown piece who’d watched the entire fight without entering it.
“Nadia—”
“Two more, Enzo. Two more and you can go home.”
“I know.” My voice broke on the last word, and I no longer had enough control left to care.
Her fingers caught weakly at my wrist. “You need to go. Leave me and—”
“No.”
“Lorenzo.”
“No.”
The word came out of me with all the rage I hadn’t been able to give the dead. All the fear I hadn’t allowed myself when she stepped into shadows alone. All the unbearable, vicious certainty that I had found her, only to lose her bleeding into ash in a town that had already taken too much from me.
“I’m not leaving you here.”
“You don’t have time to argue.”
“I’m not arguing.”
She had a minute. Maybe less.
Beyond the broken wall, ash shifted beneath a careful step. In the square, witchlight began to gather again, a pale-green pulse bleeding through the smoke. Nadia tried to turn toward it. Her blood-slick hand slipped against the stones.
“No.” I caught her wrist and pressed her back down, moving my body between hers and whatever was coming. “Stay with me.”
“Little busy dying,” she rasped. “Might need to multitask.”
Her blood ran over my fingers, hot and steady. Too steady. The wound in her thigh was beyond pressure. Beyond salve. Beyond anything I could do for her with mortal tools and hands that had already failed to keep enough of her blood inside her body.
There was one way to save her.
One.
The choice I had protected in the bath had become no choice at all. Drink and bind herself to me or die in the ash of my town with enemies moving through the smoke to finish what they’d started.
I’d wanted to give her freedom. Instead, I was offering her a cage with my blood on the lock.
Gods forgive me.
I brought my wrist to my mouth and bit down. The vein opened beneath my fangs. Blood welled hot and dark, spilled over my palm, and struck the ash beside her face in heavy drops.
Her eyes dragged to it. Then to me.
“Nadia.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. It was too raw, too desperate, stripped of every careful piece of control I had ever worn. “Listen to me. I drank from you at the inn. If you drink from me now, it will finish what that started.”
Her breathing caught.
For one terrible second, the square, the smoke, the approaching killers—everything fell away from her face.
“Whisperbound,” she murmured.
“Yes.”
The word nearly broke me.
Behind the wall, the witch’s working climbed higher. A second footfall moved through the ash. I didn’t turn. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
“It will heal you,” I said. “And it will bind you to me. There is no undoing it once it is done. No walking away from it. Not for either of us.” My bleeding wrist shook, my hand suspended between us. “I will not put this in your mouth unless you choose it.”
The gold at the edges of her eyes flared with fury.
“You knew.”
I stilled.
The accusation landed even with her dying. Even with her blood flooding warm between my fingers and death waiting on the other side of the wall. She knew exactly what I had done. Exactly what I had let her believe.
“I knew enough,” I said.
“Since the bath.”
“Yes.”
Her eyes closed only for a breath, but it was enough. Enough for me to feel the last fragile thread between us pull taut and snap. Enough to know that if she survived this, I hadn’t saved anything except her life.
I would take it. I would take her alive and hating me over any version of a world where she died believing I hadn’t wanted her.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Her eyes opened again, dim with blood loss and murderous with rage.
“Don’t you fucking dare apologize to me while I’m dying.” Her voice was barely more than breath now, but every word still had teeth. “It’s manipulative.”
A sound tore out of me. Too broken to be laughter. Too ugly to be grief.
“Nadia, please.” The words fell from my lips before pride could kill them. “Hate me when you’re better. Put a knife in every chair I ever sit in. Tell me what kind of bastard I am for every century this binds us together. Just choose.”
Witchlight crested the top of the wall, sick green against the smoke.
Her fingers lifted from the stones, shaking badly, and closed around my wrist.
Weakly. Then tighter.
“Yes,” she whispered.
I couldn’t move.
Her mouth twisted around a ghost of the woman who’d been ruining my life since the moment I met her.
“For fuck’s sake, Veyne.” Her breath hitched. “I said yes. Put the fucking wrist in my mouth before I die out of spite.”
There she was. Saints, there she was.
I pressed my wrist to her lips. Her mouth was cold when it closed over the wound. She swallowed.
And then the thing beneath my sternum broke wide open.