Nadia #2
Aldric turned immediately to his men.
“Teren, ride for the hold. Assemble healers for the prince and Lady Voss. Wagons, burial cloth, and priestesses of Evara. Tell Commander Rhys I want a relief detail here within the hour and every watch post between this town and the hold doubled before midnight.”
One rider wheeled his horse without hesitation and drove back up the road.
“Corin, take two men and secure the north approach. Mael, the south. Anything moving without our colors is detained alive if possible.”
Four more riders broke away.
“Joren, you and Halvek remain in the square. Record every body. Mark every track before the ash takes it. Disturb nothing until the priestesses arrive.”
Two men dismounted at once.
Aldric turned to the remaining riders. “You’re with me. His Highness and Lady Voss ride for the hold under guard.”
The men moved. Quickly. Cleanly. No argument. Competent. Annoyingly so.
The kind of proficiency a person wanted standing beside them in the ruins of a town. Or wanted very badly not to find standing against them.
Beside me, Enzo stood very still while orders filled the silence his grief had left behind. The bond between us carried too much: exhaustion, rage, trust in Aldric, distrust in everything else, and a low, steady awareness of exactly how angry I remained about the word “betrothed.”
He finally turned his head a fraction toward me.
Tonight, I sent through whatever strange emotional channel the bond had opened between us. I had no idea whether it carried words. The promise certainly did.
His head barely moved, but I caught the nod. Oh, good. He was learning.
I stood beside him in the ash of his ruined town, newly healed, newly bound, newly engaged against my will to a vampire prince whose blood was still drying on my mouth, while the part of me that wanted to punch him and the part of me that wanted to crawl inside his coat and stay there reached a temporary and extremely hostile truce.
It was going to be a very long night.
And because I didn’t trust myself to keep standing beside him without doing something regrettable—violent, affectionate, or some horrifying combination of the two—I went to check the horse.
Sugar waited behind the witch’s hall with her ears pinned flat and her entire body radiating offense, as if being hidden safely behind stone while the rest of us tried not to die had been a personal insult.
I ran a hand down her neck and murmured in dialect, “Good girl. Brave girl. You may bite me later, assuming I survive the rest of this evening.”
She shoved her nose into my shoulder hard enough to make me stagger.
“Not now,” I muttered. “I’ve already had an upsetting amount of violence directed at me today.”
Her tack was intact. No blood. No sign the fighting had reached her. She’d spent the battle safe, furious, and apparently saving her grievances for later.
Good horse. Terrible personality, but then again, I wasn’t exactly a picnic, either.
When I turned, Enzo stood several paces away with his coat fastened over the ruin of his shirt and his sword sheathed at his hip.
Behind him, Aldric’s men were moving through the square with grim efficiency while smoke dragged low between the buildings and the dead waited for whatever dignity the living could still give them.
The bond between us tightened—not in warning, in need. It was so strong it moved through my ribs as if it belonged there. I knew what he wanted before he reached me.
I probably should have objected.
There were a number of things on which I hadn’t yet objected sufficiently: betrothed, hidden information, permanent blood bond, one horrifyingly public announcement of an engagement I didn’t recall agreeing to, and the general problem of him being alive and beautiful enough to make all of that inconveniently complicated.
I put my foot in the stirrup and mounted Sugar before he could decide I required assistance. A small victory. Which lasted perhaps three seconds.
Enzo swung up behind me, and before I could establish so much as a symbolic inch of offended distance, his arm locked around my waist and pulled me flush against him.
He didn't hurt me. He didn't ask, either.
He held me with absolute, uncompromising certainty, done pretending I belonged anywhere except directly under his hands.
My breath caught. The bond caught fire with it.
His chest was hard and warm against my back. His arm banded low across my stomach, holding me close enough that I could feel every controlled breath he took, every raw edge beneath the iron, every terrible pulse of alive, she is alive, keep her that way he had no hope of hiding from me now.
I covered his wrist with my hand, mostly because my body had become a traitorous thing with opinions of its own, and apparently one of those opinions was that his hand belonged there.
His mouth lowered to my ear. “You will not leave my reach again tonight,” he murmured.
In dialect. My dialect. Smooth. Fluent. Old enough in his mouth that there was no mistaking it for a handful of memorized words.
I nearly froze as a shiver worked its way through me before I could murder it.
Sugar, the disloyal beast that she was, chose that exact moment to start walking as Aldric and the remaining escort formed around us.
The ruined town began to fall behind.
I stared straight ahead and began, slowly and carefully, counting the number of times I had spoken Shadow Court dialect within Enzo’s hearing.
The number was not small.
The curses at Sugar. The opinions about his manners. The extremely specific things I had muttered after he put me on a horse like a hostile parcel. The words on the cliff edge when I had believed he was dying beneath my hands.
I have you. I have you. I have you.
Oh, that sneaky, repressed, catastrophically attractive bastard.
“You speak my language,” I murmured.
“I do,” he responded, still in the language of my birth. His voice was low at my ear. Entirely too calm, considering his continued survival had just become aspirational.
“How much of it?”
“All of it.”
I drew in a slow breath through my nose. “And when, precisely, were you planning to mention this?”
His arm tightened once around me as Sugar picked her way onto the road. “I wasn’t.”
The answer was so unapologetically honest that I almost respected it. “You understood everything I said to Sugar.”
“Yes.”
Sugar flicked one ear back, smug as a demon.
“You understood everything I said about you.”
He paused, and I could feel the smile stretching his lips, even though I couldn’t see it. “Yes.”
“And you let me keep saying it.”
“I didn’t see a reason to deprive you of the pleasure.”
The laugh slipped out before I could kill it. A single sharp bark of sound, entirely inappropriate for a night full of smoke and bodies and men waiting to betray us on the road ahead.
I almost hated him for getting it out of me.
Through the bond came the sudden warmth of his relief.
That killed the laugh quickly enough. He’d needed that sound. He’d been holding me against him like the dark might steal me away if he loosened his arm, and one stupid involuntary laugh had moved through him like proof of life.
I should have been angrier. I was angry, furious. I was also, to my great irritation, impressed.
Of course he knew my language. Of course the courtly prince with a soldier’s hands and a spine made entirely of secrets had spent time learning a language no one expected him to understand, then sat beside me for a week, listening to me insult him with a perfectly straight face.
It was exactly the kind of deceitful competence I would have applauded in anyone I wasn’t currently considering murdering.
“You are an appalling man, Lorenzo Veyne.”
“I have been informed.”
“By me. Repeatedly, apparently.”
“Your phrasing was memorable.”
I turned my head a fraction, enough that my cheek nearly brushed his jaw. His breath caressed my skin and a tiny piece of my rage withered up and died like the useless traitor it was.
“You realize this makes me want to kill you more, not less.”
His lips brushed my temple. “I’m aware.”
The answer carried no amusement through the bond, only the steady, unshaken truth beneath it: You are here to threaten me. You are here to hate me. But you are here.
I felt something inside myself soften before I could stop it.
But the night had gone cold around us, and his body was warm behind mine, and his blood was still working through me, and the bond had made lying to myself considerably more difficult.
So I let my back settle into his chest. Only slightly.
Only because the road was uneven. Only because I had nearly died tonight and was therefore owed a small lapse in judgment.
His arm tightened around me by the smallest degree, and I didn’t object once.
He didn’t mention it.
Smart man.
For a little while, the road held us in the dark between one horror and the next. Smoke still clung to my hair. His blood burned steady inside me. His mouth remained far too close to my ear, and my body, traitorous little beast that it was, kept remembering the exact shape of his hands.
The conversation waiting behind the first locked door we reached was still going to be vicious. I still intended to make him explain every secret he had swallowed and every choice he’d made on my behalf.
But I no longer had any intention of murdering him before I got to enjoy making him answer for it.