Enzo #3
The ruined town breathed smoke around us.
Ash settled in her hair and across the shoulder of my torn coat.
Mira’s knife was still in my hand. My blood was drying on the hilt.
The bond between us burned with too many things to separate cleanly: grief, fury, pain, relief, and the fierce, almost unbearable fact that she was still alive to stand in this ruin beside me.
Nadia swayed. I caught her elbow before she could pretend she hadn’t.
“I’m steady,” she said.
“You’re vertical. That’s not the same thing.”
“Close enough for tonight.”
“It very much is not.”
She gave me a tired glare but didn’t pull away from my hand.
That nearly destroyed me more efficiently than the arrows had.
Her attention dropped to the wound in my shoulder, then my thigh.
Through the bond I felt the sharp assessment she made of both, the answering irritation when she found pain still present.
“You’re closing,” she said.
“So are you.”
“I had an unfair advantage.”
“You had my blood.”
“Same thing, apparently.”
The words landed like a bomb between us. The battle had ended, but there was nowhere left for either of us to put the thing we had become in the middle of it.
Her gaze lifted to mine. “Lorenzo.”
“Yes.”
“You knew.”
There was no point asking what she meant. “Yes.”
“In the bath.”
“Yes.”
Her anger reached me through the bond before it touched her face. Hot. Raw. Shot through with the hurt beneath it, the one I would rather have taken a sword through my chest than feel from inside her.
“You let me think you stopped because you regretted me. You probably still do.”
“No.” The word came out of me rough and absolute.
Her breath caught.
“Never that,” I said, dropping the blade in my hand to the dirt. “Nadia, never—”
Then her lips found mine.
There was nothing forgiving in it. She caught the front of my coat in both hands and dragged my mouth down to hers like she meant to punish the lie out of me with her teeth.
The bond went incandescent. Her fury struck through me in one hot, devastating wave, tangled with the hurt beneath it and the relief she would have sooner put a dagger through her own heart than admit to feeling.
I made a broken sound against her mouth and caught her face between my hands. For one heartbeat, I let myself kiss her back the way I had wanted to since the bath. Since the road. Since before I had known wanting her was going to be the shape of the rest of my life.
Her mouth opened under mine, angry and hungry and alive, and the taste of my own blood still lingered on her tongue.
Alive. She was alive.
Then she bit my lower lip hard enough to draw blood and pulled back.
I stared at her. She glared at my mouth, breathing hard.
“That,” she said, voice unsteady and vicious, “doesn’t mean I forgive you.”
“I caught that from the bleeding.”
“Good.”
The bond flared with satisfaction. Saints help me, I wanted to kiss her again.
She stepped back before I could make another poor decision, her eyes going cold and clear. “Now tell me what else you know.”
“Nadia—”
“No.” She pulled away from me, but she stayed within reach. “You don’t get to turn my own life into one of your careful silences anymore. Whatever the assassin in the woods told you. Whatever you learned about me that made you go still in the river. All of it.”
“Tonight,” I said.
Her stare sharpened. “Now.”
“After a healer has looked at both of us. After we’ve warned anyone still alive between here and the provincial seat that four more teams may be moving through their roads.
” I forced my voice to stay steady. “What I have to tell you deserves walls and a door and a godsdamn silencing spell. Not the ash of a town built out of bodies with potential ears.”
The bond carried her weighing the answer, testing it. Finding the difference between a delay and an evasion. She didn’t like the answer, but she accepted it, anyway.
“Tonight,” she said.
“Tonight.”
“Every fucking word he said.”
“Yes.”
“And every conclusion you drew afterward.”
I hadn’t expected that addition. I should have. “Yes.”
“And if I find out you decided to spare me some precious piece of the truth because you thought it would be gentler—”
“You’ll make the past week look restful by comparison.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I was going to say I’d gut you like a fish and let you heal slow.”
“I figured that was implied.”
For the first time since the bath, something almost like a smile touched her mouth.
It vanished in an instant, but it was enough.
She lowered herself beside me against the broken wall.
Close enough that her shoulder settled against mine for one brief, deliberate moment before she seemed to realize what she’d done.
She didn’t move away, and neither did I.
It wasn’t forgiveness or peace. It was the first thing she’d chosen to give me since the bath, and I held myself perfectly still so she wouldn’t regret it.
The bond went quiet between us.
Then Nadia’s head lifted. A heartbeat later, I heard it, too.
Hoofbeats on the road above the town.
Riders.