Nadia
Iwoke against him in the wee hours of the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep.
The fire had burned down to embers. The chamber was quiet in a way it hadn’t been for hours.
No movement. No breathless sounds. No bond dragging want and pain and pleasure through both of us until I couldn’t tell which pieces belonged to me anymore. Just the slow, steady rhythm of Enzo’s chest beneath my ear and the small, ordinary sounds a stone keep made when its garrison slept.
A guard’s boot on flagstone somewhere beyond the door. The soft tick of cooling iron in the hearth grate. His hand resting heavy and warm at my back.
My body had nothing left to give.
It wasn’t pain keeping me awake. The worst of that had passed sometime in the night, stolen by vampire blood and whatever the bond had done while I slept.
The wounds that had been open when we reached the hold were closed now.
My thigh no longer throbbed. My ribs only protested if I breathed too deeply.
My throat didn’t sting when I swallowed.
But the rest of me—the part that wasn’t body—wouldn’t settle.
I lay against his chest with my hand resting over his heart and counted the small things I’d taught myself, over a hundred years of work, to count when sleep wouldn’t come.
The cadence of my own breath. The weight of Enzo’s hand at my back.
The number of guards I’d heard on the wall.
The number of shadows in this chamber that were the right kind of shadows.
And the number that were not.
That was habit more than fear. Royal vampire holds were built to hate things like me.
Morathen had wards etched into every wall and floor, old magic layered deep enough to keep Shadow Fae from slipping through seams, witches from opening doors where no doors belonged, and gods knew what else from crawling into the king’s bedchamber at midnight.
Tharros was no different. The runes at the door were intact. The runes at the windows. The runes buried along the base of each wall. Quiet. Old. Awake. Protective, yes, but not passive. A warded room had a shape to it. A pressure. A sense of being watched by something without eyes.
This chamber had that. Mostly.
I frowned against Enzo’s chest. There was a softness near the western wall. It wasn’t a break or damage exactly. Nothing so clean as failure. Just a place where the magic bent a fraction too politely when my attention brushed it.
As if someone had taught it not to notice them.
My hand stilled over Enzo’s heart, the wrongness vanishing before I could follow it.
Rude.
I would have to think about that later.
Enzo shifted beneath me, his hand tightening at my back just enough to tell me he’d felt the change in my breathing.
“You’re awake,” he murmured.
His voice was low and rough, scraped thin by the sleep he’d either found or pretended to find, but there was no surprise in it. The bond had carried me to him through the small hours the way it had been carrying me to him all night as a quiet weight under his ribs.
He’d known before I decided to say anything.
“Unfortunately.”
A faint breath moved through his chest in an almost laugh. “For how long?”
“Long enough.”
He settled beneath me with that careful, infuriating patience of his, as if silence were another weapon he knew how to hold without cutting himself. I let him have thirty seconds of it.
Then, because I didn’t want to talk about the wrong wards, or the hour, or the strange restless thing beneath my skin that wouldn’t lie down and behave, I moved my hand from his heart to the scar low on his chest.
I’d noticed it earlier despite everything else.
This one ran in a thin pale line from his sternum toward the left side of his ribs, silvered against the dark of his skin and old enough to have lost its anger.
But it had been deep once. Deep enough that whoever had put it there had taken a real blade to him and meant to open him.
My fingers traced the edge of it before I could think better of that particular mistake. Enzo stilled beneath my hand.
“This one,” I said quietly. “Who did that?”
His breath moved beneath my palm. “Callum.”
“The youngest?”
“Yes.”
I traced the silvered line again. “Doing what?”
“Failing to listen.”
A sound tried to leave me, and Enzo’s mouth curved against my hair as if he’d felt the shape of it anyway.
“He was sixteen. I was somewhere past two hundred. My father had given him a blade for his naming day, and Callum hadn’t yet learned that enthusiasm wasn’t the same thing as control.”
Enzo’s voice warmed in a way I hadn’t heard before, the kind of warmth that didn’t belong anywhere near a scar that had nearly split him open.
“He came at me too fast, point too high, and nearly opened me from sternum to belt before I could turn him.”
“He almost gutted you,” I said.
“He did.” A faint breath moved through him, warm against my temple. “He nearly cut his own hand off doing it, too.”
“And you didn’t murder him?”
“He cried.”
I blinked.
Apparently, that explained everything.
“My father was watching,” Enzo said. “He told Callum that a prince who couldn’t control a sword wouldn’t be permitted to keep one. Callum cried harder. I bled on the training floor. We were both sent to the healer, and Callum kept the sword.”
“Of course he did.”
“My father’s more sentimental than he pretends. Especially when it doesn’t concern me.”
The quiet after that was charged. I felt the shape of what he hadn’t said.
The old place where affection had gone around him instead of through him.
The strange, careful fondness he still carried for the brother who’d carved him open because that brother had been young, foolish, loved, and forgiven.
I didn’t know what to do with that—with him. With the warmth in his voice when he said Callum’s name, or the absence underneath it when he spoke of his father.
So I did the only thing that made sense. I moved to a smaller scar above his sternum.
"This one."
"Henrick. Also sixteen. He was attempting to demonstrate a working of his own design, and it escaped him. The room had a small fire after. The scar is where one of the working's threads burned through my shirt before he could close it."
"Henrick set you on fire."
"Henrick has set most of us on fire at one point or another."
A soft chuckle left me before I could stop it. Enzo’s mouth brushed my hair, and the bond carried the smallest thread of satisfaction through him at having pulled that sound from me.
“That feels like something your family should address.”
“We have. He’s no longer allowed to demonstrate new workings near curtains.”
This time, I almost laughed on purpose.
Dangerous.
I moved quickly before that became a habit, tracing higher until I found another scar near his collarbone. This one was small, clean, and older than I was, the kind of puncture a thin blade left when it went in neat and came out the same way.
"And this?"
The warmth in him quieted in that contained way that made me brace. His chest rose beneath my cheek, then settled.
"That one is Isak." His voice had lost the warmth that Callum's and Henrick's scar carried.
"Tell me."
“It was a sparring drill. He was twelve. Possibly thirteen.” His hand rested against my back, heavy and still. “We didn’t spar often. He was small for his age and too proud to accept instruction from Kieran or Nikolai.”
“Because they patronized him?”
“Because they absolutely patronized him.”
“And Henrick?”
“Henrick was already seeing more magic than floor by then.”
That sounded like affection. It also sounded like an excuse everyone had learned to live around. “So your father gave Isak to you.”
“Yes.”
Typical. The difficult son sent to the responsible one. The dangerous thing handed to the boy already expected to hold everything else.
“We worked basic forms for most of the afternoon,” he said. “Nothing difficult. Isak had skill. All of us did. But he hated being corrected. Hated being watched. Hated any exercise that reminded him he wasn’t already the best person in the yard.”
“And?”
“We moved into close-work. Wooden blade at my chest. His task was to hold the threat steady while I disarmed him. The point of the drill was to teach him that an unmoving threat can be worked around.”
“The point was not to stab you.”
“No.”
I didn’t smile and neither did he.
“I disarmed him again on the fourth pass,” Enzo said. “That should have ended it.”
The chamber seemed quieter than it had a moment before. “He picked up the blade and came at me again. Somewhere between the disarm and reaching me, the wooden blade was no longer in his hand.”
My fingers stopped moving. “He drew steel.”
“I didn’t see him draw it.”
That landed wrong. Not because Enzo had missed it, but because Enzo didn’t miss things like that. “Who was there?”
“Nikolai and Henrick. They’d wandered down to watch and laugh at his footwork.”
“Were they laughing when he put the knife in you?”
“No.” The answer was flat and immediate.
“Henrick reached us first. He pulled the blade out without thinking, then caught the bleeding in a working before he’d fully registered what he was doing.
I was against the post of the sparring ring, holding myself up with one hand and bleeding through the other. ”
“And Isak?”
“He watched.”
A cold, careful thing moved through me. I knew what it meant when someone watched the blood before they watched the wound.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I asked him if he’d meant to do it.”
The answer slipped between us like the knife itself. I waited. Enzo’s hand flexed once against my back. “He said he didn’t know.”
“He didn’t know?”
“He said the moment had arrived, and his hand had been holding the wrong blade before the moment gave him time to choose.”
A neat little horror wrapped in a child’s voice.
“He apologized,” Enzo said. “He cried. He was thirteen. Nikolai walked him back to the keep with an arm around his shoulders.”
“And you?”
“I stayed with Henrick until the bleeding stopped.”
Bleeding against a post while someone else comforted the boy who’d put steel in him. Gods. I lay still against his chest, my hand flat over the scar.
Enzo had asked a thirteen-year-old boy whether he’d meant to kill him, and Isak hadn’t known how to answer. That should have been answer enough. But Enzo had let it become mercy instead. That was the kind of mercy families built graves on.
I didn’t push. I traced the scar once more, then covered it with my palm. “That’s a fuck of a lot of scar for an ‘I don’t know.’”
“That it is.”
“Where is Isak now?”
“Velithor.”
“The smallest province.”
“Yes.” His hand moved slowly against my back, but the rest of him stayed very still. “My father gave it to him when he came of age. No one expected much from him there.”
“But he did well.”
“He made certain he did.” That sounded more like Isak than anything else Enzo had said.
I traced the scar once with my thumb. “You don’t like saying that.”
“I don’t like what I hear in it.”
Neither did I. “What kind of man is he now?”
“Competent,” Enzo said. “Cold. Devout in a way even Vireth’s priests would admire.”
“Comforting.”
“He comes to Court when required. Writes when required. Honors every obligation placed in front of him.”
“But nothing more.”
“No.” His voice lowered. “Never anything more.”
That was interesting. Men who failed their duties were easy to spot. Men who performed them perfectly while giving nothing of themselves were much more dangerous.
“And you?” I asked. “Are you close?”
“We haven’t been close since the practice yard.”
“But not enemies.”
“No.”
A neat answer. Too neat. I laid my palm over the scar again. “Families do love pretending those are the only two options.”
“Tell me about Nikolai.”
“What about him?”
“Anything less terrible than Isak.” I traced a lazy line over his chest. “I’ve never been able to put my finger on him. He’s slippery.”
Enzo’s chest shifted beneath my cheek as he chuckled. “Nikolai would flirt with a lamp if left alone with it long enough.”
“That tracks.”
“He flirts with stewards, captains, enemies, furniture, and anything else foolish enough to hold still. He was born with that face and decided, somewhere in his first century, that wasting it would be a moral failing.”
A sound slipped out of me. Small. Amused. Dangerous.
“He runs the wealthiest province in the kingdom,” Enzo said. “And he runs it well. The gold, the charm, the laughter—most of it is a mask. A very expensive one.”
“But not all of it.”
“No.” His voice softened. “Not all of it.”
I thought of Nikolai in Morathen, smiling like the world had personally arranged itself for his entertainment while the rest of the castle unraveled around him.
“He flirted with me.”
Enzo went very still.
Oh, that was interesting.
“He did?”
“When I came to pull him through. He told me he’d been waiting his whole life for a woman to manhandle him through the dark and asked if I would consider doing it again under more leisurely circumstances.”
This time, Enzo did laugh. “Of course he fucking did. What did you say?”
“I told him to put his boots on before I dragged him through the shadows hard enough to leave pieces of him scattered across half the continent.”
“Naturally.”
“He also kissed my hand before stepping into the shadow.”
“He has manners beneath the flirting.”
“He does.”
“And?”
“And he’s not my type.”
“No,” Enzo said, too quickly.
I lifted my head enough to look at him. His face was perfectly controlled, even though the bond was not. Something warm and satisfied moved through it before he could smother the reaction.
Oh.
I smiled against his chest. “But I liked him.”
“Most people do.”
“I’m not most people.”
“No,” he murmured, his hand settling more firmly at my back. “You’re not.”
The quiet that followed was softer than it had any right to be. I let him have it for a minute. Then I shifted against him, turned enough for his gaze to follow the scar along my ribs where it curved toward my navel.
“Your turn.”
His attention dropped to the scar along my ribs, and the air between us shifted with the careful patience of a man who could twist me into knots with a single look and fucking knew it.
And still he waited for the story.
That waiting had no business undoing me.
It did.