Nadia #2
“When it comes to you? Absolutely.”
Then his mouth touched mine again, and my feigned humor broke under the weight of everything else I couldn’t say.
“I need to feel you again,” he said against my lips.
My eyes closed. There were a dozen things I could have said. Several of them sharp. None of them true enough. So I gave him the only word I had.
“Yes.”
He moved like that word mattered. As if the point was not getting anywhere but remembering that we were already here.
He turned me in his arms, pulled my back against his chest, and wrapped himself around me until there was nowhere left for the cold to get in. One arm around my waist. One hand splayed over my throat, holding the pulse beneath my skin.
There. Still beating. Still his to feel.
The first slide of him into me stole the breath from both of us. Because there was no violence to hide inside this time. No urgency to disguise the ache. No teeth. No table. No command sharp enough to cut the softness into something safer.
Only Enzo behind me, inside me, shaking once when I took him in. Only his mouth at my shoulder. Only the bond opening between us, warm and wide and terrifyingly quiet.
I felt his relief before I felt my own pleasure. That was what undid me. Not him stretching me, not the slide of his cock inside me, though gods, that was enough. Not his hand, though it knew exactly where to press, exactly how to make my body remember what he’d taught it. It was the relief.
His. Mine. Ours. And the soft, devastating truth of two people still alive in the dark.
He moved like he was proving it to himself. Like every slow thrust was another answer.
Here. Still here. Still here.
My body softened around him in ways I didn’t know how to defend against. The pleasure came low and molten, spreading instead of striking, and I bit my lip because the sound building in my throat felt too vulnerable to let loose.
His hand tightened at my throat, not enough to steal breath, only enough to feel the sound trying to climb out of me. Then he turned my face toward his and kissed it from my mouth.
Slow. Deep. Ruinously gentle.
“Give it to me,” he breathed against my lips. “No one else gets this part of you.”
That shouldn’t have broken me, but it did.
The climax moved through me slowly, a long, helpless shudder that curled my spine and dragged his name into his mouth. The bond took it from me and gave it to him, and his control went with it in one low groan against my lips as his arm tightened around my waist and he followed me over.
He stayed inside me afterward. Stayed wrapped around me. Stayed breathing against the back of my neck while the fire ticked in the grate and the bond settled around us like something with roots.
After a long while, his mouth brushed my shoulder.
“I’m keeping you,” he said.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. The bond carried the thing I wasn’t ready to say, and he held it without forcing it into words.
We must have slept then. Not deeply or for very long, but enough that when I came back to myself, gray pre-dawn had begun to creep into the chamber, the fire had almost gone out, and Enzo was still there with one hand resting flat against the bare skin of my belly.
Still awake. Still holding me. Still exactly where he’d said he would be. His voice came before I opened my eyes.
“Tell me about your mother.”
I didn’t move. “Why?”
“The assassin in the forest called you Venchenya. She of the crown. Shadow Fae royalty is passed through the matriarchal line. Which means your mother was a Shadow Queen.” His thumb moved once against my skin.
“He said the same blade that killed her had been promised you as well. That’s everything I know. ”
I opened my eyes to the dim room. “Why now?”
“Because I’m holding the woman who carries her right here.” His voice stayed low as he gently tapped the center of my chest. “And I would like to know who she was.”
I hadn’t said the words in seventy years. The last time, I said them to my uncle in a stone hut in a mountain valley north of Velithor, when I asked whether the woman who killed my mother would ever stop hunting me.
He’d told me he didn’t know. He’d asked if I wanted to disappear entirely. I’d told him no. Movement kept me alive. Work kept me moving.
I hadn’t seen him since the morning after that conversation.
“My mother was killed when I was nine,” I said.
Enzo’s hand turned beneath mine, palm up. I let his fingers close around me.
“She was killed in front of me. Three blades. Court Fae. The same line as the enforcer in the forest. The same line the witch in the burning town had bound with.” The room blurred for one breath, then sharpened again.
“They came through the shadows in her private chamber. Her wards had been broken from inside.”
His fingers tightened just enough to tell me he understood.
“She knew they were coming. Not the night. Not the hour. But she knew an assassination was being arranged. When the shadows opened, she had time to push me into the wall seam and tell me to be still.” My throat worked once. “Not to make a sound.”
The fire ticked in the grate. No other sound moved in the room.
“Then they killed her.”
Enzo didn’t say my name. Thank the gods.
“My uncle came for me before dawn. He hid me first with mountain Fae, then with vampires. Your father knew him. Trusted him enough to help or owed him enough not to refuse. I never knew which.” My mouth twisted.
“By the time the Shadow Court announced my mother’s death, I was in a small fort two valleys from Morathen, learning to read in two languages and walk through shadows without being heard. ”
“Who killed her?”
The question was soft. The answer was not. “My stepmother.”
His stillness changed, sharpening into the kind of calculation princes were born doing and soldiers learned when bodies started piling up.
“Your father lived,” he said.
There was no question in it, but I answered anyway. “Yes.”
The word tasted older than it should have. Old as smoke. Old as the shadowed seam in my mother’s wall. Old as my uncle’s hand over my mouth while I learned the difference between hiding and surviving.
Enzo’s fingers tightened around mine. “And his second wife took your mother’s crown.”
I swallowed.
There it was, stripped of court polish and pretty ink and every careful word Shadow Fae used when they wanted murder to sound like succession.
The truth.
“She took everything.”
A pulse of leashed fury moved through him. “She’s been hunting you since you were nine.”
“Yes.”
That one hurt because he said it like the world should have known when to stop.
As if there should have been a point where it looked at a child running through shadows and decided enough blood had been spilled.
There hadn’t been. There was never enough blood for people who wanted what was never theirs to take.
“For over a hundred years,” he said.
I stared at the dying fire. “Yes.”
The word should have felt heavier, but it didn’t. It had been inside me too long for that. Some grief stayed sharp. Some grief became bone. This was bone.
His breath shifted against my hair. “The kill teams. The conspiracy in Tharros. The Shadow Fae in the forest.”
“All of them.”
“Why?”
I almost laughed, because of course vampire enemies would have rules. Probably written down. Probably signed in blood and notarized by some ancient bastard in a cloak.
“Because she doesn’t want a rival at Court.”
“You’ve been gone from Court for over a century, and she’s still hunting you.”
“Yes.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense. You’re just thinking like a vampire.” I turned enough to feel his breath against my cheek. “To you, a court rival arrives with banners, armies, papers, claims. Shadow Court rivals don’t arrive. They appear.”
The bond went very quiet.
“As long as I’m alive, I can appear in her bedchamber any night of her life, and she won’t know I’m there until my knife is already at her throat.
She wears the crown my mother wore. She didn’t inherit it.
She took it. As long as the woman with the better claim is alive somewhere in the world, she doesn’t sleep. ”
“You have the better claim.”
“Yes.”
“You’re the rightful queen’s daughter.”
“Yes.”
“You’re—”
He stopped. There it was—the sentence most people reached for and got wrong. He brushed my hair back from my face, his fingers careful enough to hurt.
“You’re a princess.”
The laugh escaped before I could stop it, small and broken. Not even close. “Not quite.”
His hand stilled. “Then what?”
I opened my eyes. “My mother was the Shadow Queen, Veyne. She’s dead. I’m her heir.”