Enzo
Nadia Voss landed in me whole.
Not her thoughts. Not her secrets. Not the locked rooms inside her that she had every right to keep closed.
Her.
Her pulse under my bleeding wrist. The failing, guttering heat of her body as my blood reached it. The pain carved through her thigh, her arm, her ribs. The exhaustion she’d held upright for days through a sheer, vicious refusal to fall.
The pull beneath my sternum wasn’t just eased. It was gone. There was no distance left for it to cross.
She was simply there, fitted into me with the absolute, shattering rightness of a blade sliding home into its sheath. A place I had never known was empty closed around her, and every part of me recognized what had filled it.
Whisperbound.
Nadia drank, and the cold in her began to recede.
I felt it happen. Felt my blood moving through her like heat poured into frozen hands.
The torn wound in her thigh drew tight beneath my palm, the ripped stitching surrendering to flesh knitting itself back together.
The cut along her arm closed in a hot, sharp rush.
The bruising in her ribs eased enough that her next breath no longer caught halfway through it.
But my blood could only mend flesh.
It couldn't reopen what had been stolen from her.
Whatever her court had sealed away from her remained sealed, a vast shut door at the edge of what I could now feel of her. But the fragile flame of her life had stopped guttering. It surged once, caught, and began to burn.
Relief struck so hard it was almost agony, and I couldn’t regret a single slice of it.
She was alive.
She was alive and bound to me forever because the only choices I’d been able to give her were my blood or death in the ashes of my town. The choice I’d protected in the bath had come back to us with a blade at its throat.
I would hate myself for that later.
For now, I held my wrist to her mouth and felt her swallow. Once. Twice. Then she stopped.
Her lips left my skin, but her hand remained closed around my wrist. Her breath touched the open vein in short, warm bursts. For one moment she stayed very still against the stones, as though the world had altered beneath her, and she hadn’t yet decided whether to stand on it or set it on fire.
The bond settled between us. Her presence was everywhere. Near enough to touch without touching. Bright with pain and rage and life and one dawning, catastrophic awareness.
She opened her eyes. The pale, failing green was gone. Gold burned sharp and furious again at the edges of a shade so dark I understood why I’d mistaken it for black. Color filtered back into her cheeks beneath the soot.
“Oh,” she murmured.
One small word. It contained an alarming number of future knives, and I had no defense against any of them.
Not one I deserved, anyway.
Witchlight brightened beyond the broken wall. The world remembered we were still trying not to die.
Nadia’s head snapped toward the glow. “Witch.”
“I know.”
Her grip tightened on my wrist. Not weak now. Not dying. “Help me up.”
Every instinct in me revolted. She’d been bleeding out in my arms less than a minute ago. The bond still carried the echo of it, fresh enough that my body hadn’t caught up to the fact that she was breathing without slipping farther away from me.
“I can end this,” I said.
Her eyes cut to mine. “Wonderful. You can end it while I’m standing.”
“Nadia—”
“Do not,” she said, her voice gaining strength with every furious word, “bind me to you for the rest of our apparently obscene lifespans and then immediately start making battlefield decisions like I’m a fragile bauble you’re afraid to break.”
Despite the blood, despite the bodies, despite the witchlight gathering to kill us, a rough sound broke out of me. Almost laughter, almost grief.
There she is.
I slid one arm behind her back and lifted.
She came to her feet fast enough to make my heart stop anyway. Her hand braced once against my shoulder, then released me as though even that much reliance was more than she intended to grant tonight.
Through the bond, I felt her test the healed thigh. The surprise. The renewed, refined rage when she realized how much steadier she was.
The deep remained closed to her, but she was no longer dying, and the witch had made a serious error by leaving Nadia Voss on the board.
Nadia looked toward the square. “After this,” she said, her voice deadly quiet, “you and I are going to have a conversation.”
“I expect so.”
“You’re not going to enjoy it.”
“I expect that, too.”
A pulse of satisfaction moved through the bond, vicious and brief. Then she stepped past the broken wall and into place beside me.
I went with her.
The ruined square waited beneath smoke and ash.
Near the southern edge, green witchlight gathered between a woman’s lifted hands, throwing sick light over the dead.
Somewhere beyond her, hidden among the burned buildings, the one who’d arranged this massacre was still waiting to see whether we survived it.
Nadia’s shadows stirred at her feet. Surface shadows only, but still enough to make the witch falter.
I tightened my bleeding hand around Mira’s knife and brought my sword up with the other.
The bond burned between us, new and impossible and already full of all the things we would have to survive saying. For now, it gave me one certainty that mattered more than any other.
They’d tried to kill her. They failed.
“Left?” Nadia asked.
I felt the question before the word finished leaving her mouth.
“Yours.”
Her smile was all teeth. “Good.”
The witch released the spell.
We moved together.
The working didn’t explode across the square or burn through the ash in some broad, indiscriminate wave. It came for Nadia alone, narrow and precise, green-white force threaded with something darker beneath it.
Shadow magic. Fuck, this witch was both. And she’d built the spell to find the sealed place inside Nadia and tear at it until there was nothing left standing. I didn’t know how I knew that, I just did.
Every instinct I had screamed at me to put my body between them, but the connection between us snapped taut before I could move, full of Nadia’s clean, furious certainty that she had made a decision, and the entire world could get the fuck out of her way.
I knew, somehow, that stepping in front of her would ruin the opening she meant to take. So I did the harder thing. I trusted her.
Nadia lifted one hand.
The spell struck the shadow gathered in her palm with a sound like ice breaking under weight.
The impact tore through me, too: the brutal drag of foreign magic against the sealed door inside her, the wrench of her grip as the working tried to strip free, the flash of pain she refused to let reach her face.
The witch’s smile sharpened when Nadia’s knees bent under the force of the working. She thought she’d found the break.
Through the bond, I felt Nadia’s grip tighten, felt what she needed. Just one heartbeat. One moment.
And I gave it to her.
I crossed the square with Mira’s knife in my hand, and the witch’s attention snapped toward me a fraction too late. It was enough. Her concentration broke. Nadia turned the working.
The spell struck its maker in the chest.
The impact lifted her from her feet and drove her into the stone lip of the fountain hard enough that something broke with a wet, final crack. Witchlight scattered over the ash and went dark.
The recoil hit Nadia—not enough to take her down, not anymore, but enough.
My blood had saved her life, but it hadn’t restored what her court had taken. Every working still cost her. Every time she reached for power, the sealed door was there waiting to remind her what she could no longer touch.
Rage slid cold and sharp through me.
At the north end of the square, a figure broke from cover and bolted, one hand clamping around the small, bright sending charm at his throat.
Understanding landed with a fresh surge of fury. He hadn’t been holding back because he was cautious. He’d been watching, waiting to report when the work was finished. Waiting to tell whoever had sent them that I had died in my own burning town and Nadia had fallen beside me.
The overseer.
If he got a report out, every team between this town and the seat of Tharros would know we had survived.
“Nadia.”
“I see him.”
The shadows beneath his boots snapped upward. They caught his ankles first and yanked his legs out from under him. He hit the ash with a hard cry, one hand still reaching for the charm as they slithered up his body to curl around his throat.
I crossed the square before he could close his fist around it and brought my boot down on the hand closing around the sending charm. Bone shattered beneath my heel. The charm fell into the ash. Mira’s knife came to rest at his throat, mingling with Nadia’s power.
He was Shadow Fae. Older than the knives we had already killed, dressed too well for ordinary enforcement and not well enough for court. Political, then. A handler with enough rank to supervise the work and enough distance from the principal to be expendable when it failed.
His eyes moved from the witch’s body, to Nadia, to me. Then lower.
To the blood still dark on Nadia’s mouth. To the healed bite at my wrist. To the thigh that had been pouring blood into the ash minutes ago and now held her weight without a tremor. To the shadows stirring at her feet with a strength he’d clearly not expected to face.
His face changed as he understood exactly what he had lost. The wounded, depleted Shadow Fae his team had been sent to kill had vanished. In her place stood Nadia Voss, alive, furious, and fed with vampire blood.
Through the bond, I felt her register his fear. Her mouth curved.
“Well,” she said, walking toward him through the ash, “that expression is going to cost you.”
With his unbroken hand, he went for the dagger at his belt. I shifted my sword toward his throat.
Nadia was faster.