Nadia
The hoofbeats reached us before the riders did.
I was on my feet before common sense got a vote, my dagger already in my hand as several horses came hard down the road above the town.
The bond flared under my ribs. New. Raw. Far too intimate for something I hadn’t yet had time to properly resent.
Beside me, Enzo rose with more care than I liked.
The wound in his chest had closed. His thigh was still knitting around the damage the arrow had left behind, and his shoulder was taking its sweet fucking time replacing the meat torn from it.
If anyone tried to put another hole in him tonight, I was going to become unreasonable.
Or… more unreasonable as the case seemed to be.
His hand settled at the small of my back, steadying me. The touch should have irritated me more than it did. I made a note to be offended properly later. In the moment, it felt like a single shred of peace in a day that nearly took everything from us.
Which was rude of him, honestly.
I was still angry enough to punch him in the mouth. I was also, inconveniently, close enough to notice the blood at the corner of that mouth and remember exactly how it had felt against mine.
The bond, treacherous little monster that it was, seemed to think those were compatible urges.
“Mine,” he said quietly.
For half a heartbeat, I had several extremely sharp opinions about that word. Then the bond carried what he meant: recognition, certainty, trust worn smooth by years of use. Not mine as in possession. Mine as in “my people.”
That didn’t make them mine.
Fourteen riders crested the ridge in the dark green and silver of Tharros, coming down into the smoke in disciplined formation. The lead rider was pushing hard until the town came fully into view.
Then his horse checked beneath him. The whole formation slowed.
Good.
At least they had eyes.
The square was still full of what had been done here: roofs breathing smoke into the evening air, bodies laid in ash, Mira in the road with Evara’s crescent marked in ash across her brow, the witch dead in her hall, the broken door of the baker’s shop I had no intention of looking toward again tonight.
The horror of it had started settling into me, deeper than smoke, deeper than blood, and I didn’t know if anything would ever wash it out.
And in the middle of it all stood Enzo, blood dried down the front of his coat, sword still in his hand, looking like the town had burned something out of him and left only the dangerous bits behind.
I stood beside him with his blood dried at the corner of my mouth and a bare dagger in my grip.
The lead rider’s hand went to his sword. The men behind him followed. I moved half a step in front of Enzo before I could stop myself. Apparently, being eternally bound to a man came with several deeply inconvenient instincts.
The bond stirred behind me: surprise, then something warmer and far more dangerous. I ignored that, too.
“Aldric.” Enzo’s voice was rough with smoke and grief, but it still carried through the ruined square like command had been built into his bones. “Stand down.”
The lead rider pulled up ten paces from us.
Aldric.
Enzo’s second. Fifteen years of trust wrapped in dark green and silver, now staring at his prince in the ashes of a slaughtered town with one hand still on his weapon.
Before I left Morathen I’d been briefed on every member of Enzo’s inner circle, their families, their connections.
The file hadn’t been as thorough as I would’ve preferred, but it had given me enough to start.
For now.
He was older than I had imagined, somewhere deep into his second century, lean and controlled, his blond hair cropped short in the same military fashion as Enzo’s. He had the bearing of long service, of half a lifetime spent in the same colors and not one day of it worn lightly.
His eyes went to Enzo first. Wounds. Blood. Sword. Balance. Breathing. A soldier’s inventory of a damaged commander.
Then his attention shifted to me.
His gaze caught on the blood at my mouth. The dagger in my hand. The bodies of the witch and the man whose neck I had snapped in the ash. Something changed in his face, a pause too clean to be shock. A calculation too fast to be called hesitation.
A loyal captain arriving too late to save his people and finding an unknown Shadow Fae armed beside his wounded prince might make exactly that calculation. A traitor finding survivors where he’d expected bodies might make it, too.
I put the thought away in the part of my mind reserved for later.
Through the bond, I let a small pulse of caution touch Enzo. He received it but didn’t react.
“My prince,” Aldric said carefully. “Are you wounded?”
“I’m wounded, but I’m whole.” Enzo’s voice hardened. “The threat is handled. Stand your men down.”
Aldric’s gaze flicked toward me once more. “My prince, the woman—”
“Is with me.” The words cut through the smoke. “She’s the only reason I’m still breathing. Stand your men down, Aldric. I won’t tell you again.”
Silence stretched across the square. Then Aldric’s hand left his sword hilt far too slowly for my liking. The riders behind him followed his lead. Only then did the tension in Enzo’s gut ease by a fraction, and the bond opened around the feeling before he could hide it from me.
Relief. He trusted Aldric.
Fuck.
That didn’t prove the man innocent. It only meant that if he was guilty, the betrayal would carve Enzo open somewhere I had no intention of letting anyone reach.
Aldric dismounted and approached with both hands visible. He stopped several paces away and bowed his head.
“My prince.” He crossed the last distance and knelt in the ash before Enzo. The grief in his face was controlled, but not absent.
“I rode the moment the watchtowers reported smoke,” he said. His voice softened, just slightly. “We came as fast as we could. I’m sorry we weren’t faster.”
Enzo placed one hand on his shoulder. “You came,” he said, and something in him hurt so badly through the bond that I nearly hated Aldric for making him feel it. “You came, Aldric. That’s enough.”
No performance, no doubt. Years of trust, real and warm and buried too deep to uproot in a single burned square.
I filed that, too.
Aldric rose and turned to me. His bow wasn’t as deep as the one he’d given Enzo, but it was considerably deeper than an unknown mercenary covered in blood had any right to expect.
“My lady,” he said. “May I have your name?”
The bond shifted. Enzo’s mind remained his own, locked to me in all the ways that mattered and none of the ways that would make this easier. But I felt the decision arrive in him: quick, hard, already committed.
A shield. A story. A spectacularly stupid choice he was about to make without consulting me.
“Captain,” Enzo said, “this is Nadia Voss.”
I turned my head, wanting to ward off whatever bullshit plan he’d managed to assemble in the half-second he’d given it.
“She is my betrothed.”
The bond went white-hot with my fury, and the bastard didn’t so much as blink. He'd decided the protection of publicly placing me under his name was worth my rage, and he’d apparently accepted that rage as a future problem.
Fine. I had a future problem for him, too.
His full name had appeared exactly once in the briefing his father’s people had given me before this journey, buried in a page of official titles, holdings, and identifying information so dry that no sane person would have remembered a word of it.
Unfortunately for Enzo, I had never claimed sanity. And I never forgot a useful weapon.
I let my dagger flip once in my palm, hilt to blade to hilt. Every soldier in the square saw it.
“Lorenzo Aurelius Veyne,” I growled.
The bond gave me the most beautiful flash of horror I’d experienced in my life. The silence that crashed down around us suggested no one else had known it, either.
Excellent.
“I’m going to gut you in front of your men and watch you bleed out in the fucking dirt.”
The riders behind Aldric went completely still. Hands shifted back toward weapons.
Aldric’s expression acquired a new layer of careful blankness, which was fair. He’d been in this town less than five minutes and had already learned that his prince’s betrothed knew a deeply compromising secret and was prepared to assassinate him publicly.
Enzo recovered with insulting speed.
He looked at his men, at Aldric. Then he pulled a thread of dry humor over the ruin inside him, because apparently even standing in the ashes of his people, he still had enough instinct left to protect me from the danger of being misunderstood.
“Pay her no mind, Captain,” he said. “This is simply how she flirts. If she truly intended to kill me, she would have kept her mouth shut and gutted me in my sleep.”
“That’s still on the table,” I snarled.
Through the bond came the unmistakable sensation of a man who knew precisely how much trouble he’d just bought himself and hadn’t regretted the bargain for even half a breath.
I was going to kill him.
Slowly.
Painfully.
Probably after kissing him again, which was deeply unfortunate and not something I intended to examine in front of witnesses.
Aldric’s mouth threatened a smile before discipline murdered it. Behind him, his men eased their hands away from their weapons by careful degrees.
The story had landed for the simple reason that Enzo had said it, and in Tharros, his word apparently still had weight even in a street full of bodies.
I kept the dagger out for one more heartbeat. Just long enough for every soldier there to understand that his joke hadn’t made my threat less sincere. Then I sheathed it.
“Captain Aldric,” I said, in the flat professional tone of a woman not currently deciding where best to stab the prince she’d accidentally bound herself to for eternity, “thank you for the welcome.”
“Lady Voss.” Aldric bowed his head again. “The House of Tharros is at your disposal.”
Wonderful.
I had acquired a household and a fiancé in the same five minutes. At this rate, by breakfast someone would hand me a province and an infant.