Enzo #2
Her blade kissed the inside of his wrist and opened it with one clean, surgical motion. His fingers released before he’d fully cleared the dagger from its sheath. The weapon dropped uselessly into the ash beside him.
He made a sound through his teeth.
Nadia crouched beside him. The shadows still held his ankles. My boot still ground his broken wrist into the stones. Her dagger slid behind one knee. The cut was swift and exact.
His body jerked against the stones as the tendon parted. The shadow at his ankles tightened before he could thrash hard enough to disturb the ash beneath him.
Then she moved to the other leg.
“Nadia,” I said, though I didn’t know why.
I wasn't trying to stop her. The bond had simply carried the cold precision of her intent straight through me, and some part of me needed her to know I was still there with her inside it.
She paused for less than a heartbeat, listening.
“He’s Shadow Fae,” she said without looking at me, her voice quiet. Practical. “If I loosen the hold enough to question him, I’m not leaving him legs he can use to escape.”
Then she cut the second tendon. He choked on a scream.
I felt no pity for him. None. He’d walked willingly into a town burned around the bodies of my people. He’d come to confirm that the woman bound to me died in the ash beside them.
Nadia rose just enough to look down at him.
“Now,” she said, wiping the edge of her blade against his coat, “you can either answer our questions, or I can start getting creative.”
The shadows loosened from his throat just enough to let him breathe and speak, while keeping the rest of him exactly where she wanted him.
“Talk,” she ordered.
The darkness tightened again, not choking him yet, only reminding him how quickly that could change.
Nadia’s emotions reached through our connection—her cold focus. Her exhaustion. The lingering burn of the witch’s spell skittering over her skin. The rage she’d banked down into something so much worse than fury.
She expected me to recoil.
The knowledge reached me as clearly as her pain had.
I didn’t. Couldn’t. I stepped up beside her and rested my sword point beneath his breastbone.
Something in her shifted. It was small, gone before I could name it, but she knew. Whatever she chose to be in this square, she wouldn’t have to hide it from me.
“Who ordered the town burned?” I asked.
The overseer spat blood into the ash. Nadia’s blade pressed into his wrist, twisting. His mouth tightened.
“That was your one warning,” she murmured, her eyes flashing.
“South,” he gasped. “The order came through the southern routes three days ago. I never saw who ordered it.”
“The brief,” I said.
His eyes flicked toward the bodies in the square. “The prince comes through this town. The prince burns with it.”
The words entered me cleanly. No immediate rage. No fresh loss of control. Only the quiet, terrible understanding that Mira and the children and the witch dead in her hall hadn’t died because someone wanted this town.
They died because someone wanted me to find them.
Nadia’s fury struck through the bond hard enough to stagger me more than the arrow had. I had no time to decide what that meant.
“Shadow Court?” she asked.
His eyes slid toward her. Wrong choice. The shadows climbed another inch around his throat.
“There was a contingent assigned,” he said quickly. “Separate briefing. Separate orders. I wasn’t told why.”
“You didn’t ask?” Nadia murmured.
His eyes slid closed for a brief moment, as if he knew what he said next would do him no favors. “I was paid not to.”
“How admirably professional of you.”
“How many teams remain?” I asked.
“Four between here and the provincial seat. Maybe more now. My report was supposed to trigger the next movement.”
I looked down at the sending charm broken in the ash.
“No report,” I said.
“No,” he breathed.
“Names.”
“I don’t have them. I swear it. The coordination went through intermediaries.”
“What coordination?”
His throat worked against the shadow.
“The Tharros operation. The Shadow Court contingent. Both routes used the same trigger. Both referenced the same prior failure.”
My blood went cold.
“What failure?”
He hesitated. Nadia tilted her dagger.
“Tobias,” he blurted. “The cell in Morathen. The instruction was that we wouldn’t repeat Tobias’ mistakes.”
Smoke moved through the square between us. The fires cracked softly in the buildings around us. Tobias hadn’t been the body of the thing. He’d been the first wound visible through the skin.
The rest of it had been learning. Adjusting. Moving quietly through the roads and villages of my province while Kieran and I congratulated ourselves for cutting one rotten piece out of Morathen.
The rot lived here. In Tharros. In my home.
Nadia absorbed the understanding as it landed in me, her rage altering around it, no less violent but suddenly aimed in the same direction as mine.
The poor bastard’s gaze darted between us. He saw it, too.
“You can’t stop what’s already in motion,” he said, a desperate edge breaking through his composure. “You don’t know how far it reaches.”
“No,” Nadia said. “But you’ve been moderately helpful in deciphering that, haven’t you?”
His face drained of what little blood he had left.
Her gaze flicked to me.
She didn’t need my permission to kill him. She had him pinned in her shadows, her blade at his wrist, and more reason than I had to leave his body in pieces across the square.
But she looked at me, anyway. Gave me the choice. In the ashes of my people, with the conspiracy that had murdered them spreading its roots beneath my province, that choice mattered more than I could say.
I inclined my head once.
The shadows around his throat tightened. His neck broke with a clean, ugly snap and his body went slack.
For a moment neither of us moved.