Nadia #3
I felt the moment it landed. The bond went utterly silent, as if every part of him had stopped moving at once so the prince, the commander, and the heir to a vampire crown could take the same breath and not lose their collective mind.
Three seconds. Four. Then—
“You’re a queen.” His voice was flat. Almost calm and absolutely not all at the same time.
I didn’t look away. “Of a throne I never asked for and never wanted.”
The silence after that was full of him rearranging a hundred facts around one new truth. Me. The Shadow Court. My mother. The kill teams. The conspiracy in Tharros. A stolen crown still hunting the woman who should have worn it.
To his eternal credit, he didn’t pull away. He didn’t leave the bed. He didn’t kneel, which was good, because I might have stabbed him. He only pulled me closer. His mouth found my forehead.
“Nadia.”
“Don’t say anything stupid.”
“I didn’t bond a throne.”
My chest froze. His mouth lingered against my skin.
“I bonded you.”
I closed my eyes.
“The throne is yours to decide what to do with. If you want it, I’ll help you take it. If you don’t, I’ll help you keep refusing it. If you want to walk away from it entirely and live the rest of your life in a small house in a valley somewhere, I’ll live in that valley with you.”
My breath caught.
“The throne isn't in this bed,” he said. “We don't have to decide tonight.”
I pressed my face against his chest, and for the first time in what felt like a hundred years, I let myself breathe all the way out.
He didn't fill the quiet that followed. Didn't press for the questions he had every right to ask. My uncle. My father. The Court. The prophecy of a queen who’d survived by becoming a rumor with knives.
He had a thousand questions. I felt the shape of them in him. And I felt him hold each one back. That may have been the kindest thing he’d done all night.
The windows had begun to gray when I said, “I haven’t seen my uncle in thirty years.”
His hand stilled at my back. “Do you think he’s dead?”
“I hope so.” The words came out flat. They had to. Anything else would have broken something I still needed.
Enzo understood the alternative without making me name it. Dead, or she had him.
I’d spent thirty years praying for the first because the second would unmake me. Thirty years not thinking of him because thinking of him meant imagining every possible way he might still be breathing. And suffering.
His mouth touched the top of my head. No promises. No vows. No prince-shaped declaration that he would find a man I had already mourned in every way but burial.
Only his arms around me. Only his breath in my hair. Only the steady, wordless truth of him settling against the rawest places in me.
I’m here. I’m not leaving. Whatever the truth is, we’ll face it. Together.
The not-promising nearly broke me.
The gray at the windows brightened.
I shifted against him before the room could get any softer. “I have work to do, Veyne.”
“In the hold.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“After.”
He absorbed that the way he’d absorbed everything else tonight—carefully, without taking more than I gave.
“You will come back.” Not a question. A choice he was making to trust me with.
“Before breakfast.”
“Take your blades.”
I was already planning on it, but I let him try to boss me around.
“And a cloak,” he added.
I rose before he could say anything worse, dressed in the clean shirt and trousers from my pack, belted my coat over them, and tucked blades where they belonged. All but one.
At the door, I stopped. Then I crossed back to the bed. Enzo’s gaze followed me, quiet and dark and too knowing by half. I bent and kissed him—slowly, softly, in a way I hadn’t known either of us had in us until tonight.
When I pulled away, he let me. That mattered, too.
I took the narrow blade from beneath my sleeve and placed it in his hand. His fingers closed around it by reflex.
“Nadia.”
“I’m not the only one they’re hunting.”
He went very still.
Good.
Let him feel that. Let him understand that this wasn’t me asking permission, or offering comfort, or doing anything so humiliating as admitting I cared whether he remained breathing.
It was a blade. A warning. A promise.
His thumb brushed the hilt once, slow and careful and somehow, I felt that across my skin.
“I have weapons.”
Across the room and not in his hand, but yes. “I know.”
“And guards.”
Ones I didn’t trust to keep him breathing, sure. “I know.”
“And you’re leaving me with yours, anyway.”
If it meant he would be breathing when I got back? Absolutely. “Yes.”
His mouth softened in a way that did terrible things to my ribs. “Then I’ll keep it until you come back.”
Not if. Until.
I stepped away before that could matter more than it already did.
The chamber wards hummed as I reached the door, old magic layered into the stone to keep things like me from slipping through seams where we didn’t belong. At least this room was safe, even if I had to use the latch like a civilized person.
Disgusting.
The corridor was quiet.
The hold was asleep.
And I had work to do.