Nadia #2
The same hand that had touched this, softened the ward in our chamber. The broken corridor sigils were knife-work. Patient, skilled, physical. This wasn’t that. This was power with a steady hand.
Someone had laid a secret mouth behind Aldric’s desk and taught the hold not to notice it speaking. Anything he saw could pass through this mark. Anything he heard. Any order Enzo gave. Any route he chose. Any weakness he showed.
The conspiracy didn’t merely have a traitor in Tharros. It had an ear. A living one. And it had been listening for months.
I let the tapestry fall back into place. Slowly. Carefully. I didn’t touch the mark. Didn’t test it. Didn’t deface it, tempting as that was.
If I broke it then, whoever held the other end would know.
The hold might be cleaner by sunrise, yes. But the person Aldric feared for—the sister, the daughter, the wife, whoever had put that look in the shape of his office—might be dead before the first bell rang.
So the mark stayed. The runes stayed broken. The hold stayed compromised. And I took the knowledge with me.
I turned, crossed to the broken sigil at the corridor door, and let the shadow take me back into the gallery.
The household had begun to stir. Dawn shift waking below. Boots on stone. A cook snapping at a scullion. A wagon wheel creaking in the courtyard. Ordinary sounds. Safe sounds.
Lies, all of them.
I returned to the chamber the way I’d left it. Through seams. Through silence. Through a hold that had been letting enemies breathe inside its walls for half a year.
Enzo’s eyes opened before my boots touched the floor.
He’d been awake for some time. The blade I’d left him rested on the small table beside the bed, within reach of his hand.
He hadn’t slept with it clenched in his fist. He’d placed it where he could find it if he needed it.
That was what trust looked like in a four-hundred-year-old prince.
I crossed the room and slid the blade back under my sleeve.
His gaze stayed on my face. Whatever he saw there killed the softness in him.
Prince and commander rose behind his eyes in the same breath, and the bond tightened between us with his recognition of what had moved through me.
It wasn’t fear. Fear scattered.
This was colder. Sharper. The kind of worry that came with a locked door behind you and the knowledge that something was already inside the room.
Enzo sat up slowly. The dark-green coverlet slid to his waist.
“What did you find?”
My gaze flicked once to the western wall. Only once. His followed. The room changed around us.
No alarm. No dramatic shift. Just Enzo understanding enough to stop asking for details in a chamber I no longer trusted.
“Bad,” I said.
His jaw flexed.
“How bad?”
“Worse than Aldric.”
For one breath, nothing in him moved. Then the bond went very still. That was almost worse.
He didn’t ask me to explain. Didn’t demand names, evidence, routes, failures. Didn’t make me speak into a room where the wards had been taught to look away. He only held my gaze and absorbed the shape of what I was giving him.
Aldric was compromised. The hold was open. Someone stronger had touched the wards. Something was waiting in the dark, and I knew where its fingers had been.
“Show me,” he said.
“After we are on the road. Not here.”
“Today.”
“Today.”
He gave one short nod. That was all. There was no argument, no lecture. No prince-shaped explosion because fifteen years of trust had just cracked under six months of evidence. He filed the wound and didn’t bleed where anyone could see.
Gods, he was dangerous.
He rose from the bed and crossed to me. Bare feet. Bare chest. Sleep-mussed hair and a face carved into something too calm to be anything but fury. His hands came to my face.
For a second, I thought he might ask.
He kissed me instead, slowly and deliberately, with no attempt to distract me from what I’d found or soften the shape of it. His mouth simply found mine, reminding us both that whatever waited in the walls, I’d come back.
I let myself take one breath against him. One. The bond carried the rest.
I am here. I know. We will deal with it.
Then he stepped back and reached for his shirt.
“Breakfast,” he said. “Get him talking.”
That almost pulled a smile out of me.
“Veyne,” I said, sliding the last of my knives into place, “I am going to make him love every minute of it.”
The breakfast chamber was on the east side of the keep, one floor below our quarters, lit by morning sun through three tall windows. The household had laid out the kind of meal a Tharros military hold gave its prince when he was leaving in formation.
Cold meat. Warm bread. Hard cheese. Small bright autumn pears from the orchard outside the walls. Bloodwine in a heavy stone jug. Simple. Practical. Border-fort elegant, which meant someone had polished the knives and pretended the table had never seen blood.
I came down in clean leathers and a fresh shirt, every blade hidden, every thought sharper than the last. And over it all, I wore the soft expression of a woman who’d been thoroughly, ruinously taken apart in the night and had no intention of pretending otherwise.
Let Aldric see that. Let him file me as bed-warm and distracted. Let him believe the prince’s bonded mercenary had spent the night learning the shape of Enzo’s mouth instead of the shape of treason carved into his walls.
Aldric was already at the table.
He rose when I entered and bent his head with the same careful courtesy he’d shown in the burning square.
“My lady Voss.”
“Captain.”
Enzo’s hand came briefly to the small of my back as I settled, a small touch made public with such quiet deliberation that it warmed something in me I absolutely didn’t have time to name.
Aldric noticed.
Only for half a breath. He was too careful to linger, but his eyes caught the gesture, the clean shirt, the unhidden ease between us, and the satisfied softness I’d put on like another blade.
Then he buried the reaction.