Nadia #3
Good. Let him think he knew what had happened in that room. Let him think he knew what hadn’t.
I ate.
I let Enzo reach across and pour for me before I asked. Let his shoulder brush mine. Let the household see the prince’s intended being treated as exactly that.
No one stared. They didn’t have to.
By the time I finished my first cup, every soldier and servant in the room understood that whatever else had changed in Tharros overnight, the bond between Lorenzo Veyne and Nadia Voss was neither rumor nor convenience, and it was not temporary.
Aldric understood it, too. His face stayed neutral. His hands stayed steady. But his back was to the wall.
His chair faced the room and both doors. The three lamps in the breakfast chamber burned despite the morning sun, and the one nearest him had both wicks lit, throwing unnecessary light into a corner that was already bright.
Fear, then.
He was still watching the shadows in a room full of sunlight and polished knives and men, pretending the walls hadn't been listening for months.
The ledgers, the broken runes, the hidden sending mark—those were proof.
This was worse.
A captain who’d served Enzo for fifteen years, sitting at breakfast with perfect posture and a lit lamp at his elbow because he knew what might come out of the dark.
I let my expression soften by one careful degree and lifted my cup. “Captain Aldric.”
He turned that flat, courteous attention on me at once. “My lady.”
“How long have you served Prince Lorenzo?”
“Fifteen years.”
“And before Tharros?”
“The king’s guard. Twenty-three years.”
“A soldier all your life, then.”
A small bow of his head. “All my adult life.”
There was pride in that. And grief. I hated that I heard both.
“Family?” I asked.
Half a heartbeat, nothing more, but there it was. The smallest tear in the cloth.
“A sister,” he said. “In the north.”
Enzo didn’t move beside me.
“Younger?”
“Older. Five years.”
“Married?”
“Widowed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, my lady.”
His voice didn’t change, but his eyes did.
“Children?” I pressed.
Another pause. Even smaller. Gods.
Aldric took a breath through his nose. “A daughter. Grown. She has children of her own now.”
“Oh.” I smiled over the rim of my cup. “A great-uncle, then.”
“Twice over.”
There it was. The leverage—a sister, a daughter, two children small enough to be used by people who preferred clean hands and bloody instructions. I’d come looking for the leash around Aldric’s throat, and I fucking hated finding it.
Beside me, Enzo cut into a pear with exquisite care. The knife didn’t so much as scrape the plate. That was how I knew he was furious.
“Do you see them often?” I asked.
“Not as often as I would like.”
“No,” I said softly. “Family has a way of becoming harder to reach when the work gets dangerous.”
His fingers tightened once against his cup. Once. Then stopped. “Yes, my lady.”
The words were nothing, but the answer wasn’t. The breakfast chamber wasn’t safe. The walls had ears, and Aldric knew exactly where the shadows gathered even with every lamp burning. He wouldn’t say more here.
He’d already said enough.
I let the conversation drift back to the road. The column. The wagons. The pace. The expected arrival at the seat.
Aldric answered each question with the flat competence of a captain who’d decided he would perform his duties perfectly until the moment that duty finally cut his throat.
Enzo listened. Asked one question. Let Aldric answer.
To anyone watching, we were a prince, a captain, and my intended discussing the morning’s departure. To me, the room had narrowed to three things.
Aldric’s hand on his cup. The lamp burning too bright at his side. The shadows he couldn’t stop himself from checking.
The meal ended. We rose. The column waited in the courtyard.
Sugar greeted me with her ears pinned and the disapproving snort of a horse who’d clearly been left in a stable while I did interesting things without her.
“I know,” I murmured in dialect, running a hand down her neck. “Deeply inconsiderate of me.”
She bit at the front of my coat without committing to it. Affection, apparently, from a monster. I respected it.
Enzo mounted behind me without comment. His arm came around my waist, his chest settling against my back, warm and solid and far too steady for a man riding out of a hold that had been betraying him for half a year.
The column formed around us.
Aldric rode at the head, where a captain belonged when escorting his prince from a fortress. Two guards flanked him. The healer rode near the center. The rest took formation with practiced efficiency, steel and leather and hooves shifting under the cold autumn sky.
Sugar fell in just behind Aldric’s group. Exactly where the column’s master at arms had placed us. Exactly where I wanted to be.
The gate opened. Iron rose. Hooves struck stone.
We rode out of Tharros’ hold into the morning. Ahead of us, Aldric’s back was a perfectly disciplined line.
Enzo watched the road. Aldric watched Enzo. And I watched Aldric.
Because the trouble with traitors was that they always thought the shadows belonged to them.
They didn’t.
Not anymore.