Nadia
Marked.
Not cut or wounded in any ordinary sense. Marked.
The third tendril had caught me in the half-second I’d looked at Soren’s face instead of the working wearing it. The slice ran from beneath my left eye toward my jaw, shallow enough that it should have been annoying and nothing more.
Except the blood was too thin. It ran hot and fast down my face, over my jaw, beneath my collar. The working had put something in the cut.
Obviously. Because this night had apparently saw an ordinary horror and decided it lacked ambition.
The wraith’s tendrils lifted, tasting the air between us. It wasn’t searching anymore. It knew me.
My stomach dropped. I needed to end this. Now.
I stepped through the shadow pooled beneath the wraith’s feet and came up inside its guard, blade already rising. The point drove into what remained of its throat and punched through to the pulsing knot in its chest.
The working screamed without sound.
It should have died. The knot should have broken. The body should have collapsed. Soren should have been released from whatever leash my stepmother had tied through his bones. Instead, the magic closed around my blade.
Held it. Pulsed. The tendrils struck my wrist. My forearm. My sleeve. They wrapped and tightened, climbing with horrible patience toward my face. Toward the cut.
Oh. Fuck.
It wasn’t trying to kill me. It was trying to move. The wraith spread through contact with broken skin. Tendrils, blood, an open wound, and a working hungry enough to climb from one body into another. The thing inside Soren wanted out of its leash.
And I had given it a door.
I pulled against the blade. The working held. I reached for the shadow at my feet. The shadow held, too.
Too thick. Too eager. Slick with seepage from the deep and swollen enough to catch the wraith’s magic as easily as it caught mine. I had stepped into it cleanly. Stepping out meant dragging myself against its want, and the wraith was already on top of me.
The dead mouth hung inches from mine. The black sockets fixed on the blood running down my cheek. The tendrils climbed. One touched my jaw. Cold slid under my skin.
No. Absolutely fucking not.
I twisted, drove my knee into the wraith’s ribs, and felt bone give beneath the strike. It did nothing. The tendril at my cheek pressed closer, searching for the cut with blind, hungry certainty.
I had a second. Maybe less. Then I heard a horse.
Branches snapped somewhere behind me. Hooves hammered over ground that should have slowed any sane rider. The bond flared wide open, and Enzo’s fury came through it so hard it nearly knocked the breath out of me.
He came out of the trees like violence given a body. The horse hadn’t finished stopping before he was off it, sword already in his hand, coat snapping dark behind him. He crossed the distance between us in three strides.
The wraith sensed him. Its head turned. The tendrils released me.
Enzo took Soren’s head off with one stroke. The blade cut through ruined flesh, dead bone, and the black working at the core. For one heartbeat, the magic held its shape.
Then it broke like glass dropped on stone.
The body collapsed at my feet. The tendrils went slack. The black sockets emptied, and at last—at fucking last—there was nothing behind them but bone and shadow and the terrible mercy of stillness.
The forest went silent around us.
My knees hit the ground before I decided to drop.
Enzo was there in a breath. One hand caught my shoulder.
The other came to my chin, turning my face toward the failing light.
His eyes found the blood. The cut. The place where the tendril had touched me, and every part of him stilled.
It was the kind of stillness that meant something inside him had gone very, very cold.
“Show me,” he said.
I tilted my face up.
Enzo saw the cut on my cheek. The blood on my shoulder where the tendril had anchored. The tremor in my hands I hadn’t noticed until his gaze dropped to them.
His fingers came to my jaw, careful and hard at once, turning my face toward the failing light. He stared at the cut for one long second. Then his eyes came back to mine.
His face had gone very still.
“It tried to get in,” he said.
“Yes.”
“How close?”
“It touched me.”
His breath left him slowly through his nose. The bond was wide open. That was the problem.
He wasn’t hiding anything. Not the terror. Not the fury gathering behind it. Not the sharp, brutal shape of “I almost lost you” moving through him so strongly I could hardly breathe around it.
I didn’t try to soften it. I didn’t think he would've let me.
“Enzo.”
“Quiet.”
The word was flat, controlled.
He pulled back the collar of my coat and inspected the wound at my shoulder, then turned my face again to study the cut beneath my eye. Fast. Precise. Ruthless in the way only frightened men with excellent training could be ruthless.
When he was satisfied there were no other wounds I had failed to mention, he bit into his wrist. No hesitation. No ceremony. Blood welled dark and fast.
“Drink.”
I opened my mouth around the wound because arguing seemed like a spectacularly poor use of my last remaining brain cell. His blood hit my tongue hot and metallic, and the bond flared.
The cut on my shoulder closed first, knitting with a deep ache that made my fingers curl against his coat. The wound on my cheek fought harder. Whatever the wraith had left in it resisted his blood, cold and oily beneath my skin, but Enzo only held me tighter and fed me more.
Stubborn, overprotective bastard.
The lightheadedness receded. The shaking in my hands eased. The wound at my cheek pulled itself together slowly, painfully, leaving a thin tight line from below my eye toward my jaw that refused to leave.
He saw that, too. His eyes went darker.
“Enough,” I murmured, lifting my mouth from his wrist.
“It’s not closed.”
“It won’t close cleanly.” My voice came out rougher than I liked. “Wraith wounds don’t always obey.”
His thumb brushed the edge of my jaw, just beneath the new scar. Then his gaze shifted past me.
To the body. To Soren. The fury in the bond changed shape.
It didn’t lessen. It went colder. Sharper. Less aimed at me and more aimed at the woman who’d done this. The woman who’d stolen my mother, my throne, my childhood, and now, apparently, the loyal dead from the floor where they’d fallen.
“Who was he?” Enzo asked.
The question should have been simple. It wasn’t. I looked at the body lying in the leaves.
Not Soren. Not anymore. But enough of him remained that the lie hurt.
“Captain of my mother’s guard.”
Enzo froze beside me.
“He died in her chamber,” I said. “The night she was killed. He was on the floor beside her when my uncle came for me.”
For a moment, the only sound in the forest was the slow drip of Enzo’s blood from his wrist into the leaves. Then he closed his hand and the wound sealed.
“What does he need?”
Not "What do we do with the body?" Not "What is it?"
What does he need?
The question hit harder than it had any right to.
I glanced away before it could find anything useful on my face.
“I can’t release him properly.”
“Why?”
“Because a wraith bound by sovereign-adjacent working should be released by sovereign command.” My mouth twisted around the words. “And I’ve spent over a hundred years refusing the part of me that could give one.”
“Nadia.”
“Don’t.”
His jaw tightened.
Good. Let him hate it. I hated it, too.
“Soren died protecting my mother,” I said. “He died doing work I should have come back to finish. I thought she left him to rot. I didn’t let myself wonder what else she might have done with his body.”
“This isn’t on you.”
A bitter laugh rattled up my throat. “Of course it is.”
“No.” His voice cut through the forest with quiet violence. “You were a child.”
“I’m not now.” The words came out steadier than they felt.
I looked back at Soren. At the body lying in the leaves. At the man who’d died beside my mother while I ran.
Something hot burned behind my eyes.
No. Not now.
I swallowed hard. The pressure stayed, anyway.
“I’m not now,” I repeated, quieter this time. “And he waited a hundred years for someone to come back for him.” My voice caught on the last word.
I hated that. Hated the weakness of it. Hated that after a century of surviving, after all the blood and running and burying, this was what threatened to undo me.
A dead guardsman. A promise I had never known I was keeping. I blinked once, hard. The blur remained.
Damn it.
I turned my face slightly away before either of them could see too much.
“He doesn’t need your guilt.” Enzo’s eyes held mine. “He needs rest. Tell me how to give him that.”
Something in my chest shifted. I looked at Soren again. At the ruin of his throat. The slack tendrils. The empty sockets that were finally only empty.
“We need deep shadow,” I said. “And blood.”
“You have both.”
As if the world would rearrange itself because he’d decided it should.
Infuriating, but useful.
I pushed to my feet too quickly and swayed. Enzo caught me by the waist, and I let him. Only because the ground was being an asshole.
We carried Soren to the base of an old oak whose roots broke the earth in thick, twisted ridges. The shadow beneath it was deep enough to be useful and wrong enough to make my teeth ache. I knelt beside the body and drew the release-pattern in the dirt with the point of my blade.
Small marks. Careful marks. Older than most of the kingdoms that still liked to pretend they’d invented grief. My mother had taught me this pattern when I was very young, in the days when she’d still been teaching me what a queen owed the dead.
My hand remembered it.
Enzo knelt opposite me and opened his palm with his own blade. Three drops of his blood fell into the center of the working. The marks took the blood.
Amber light threaded through the grooves I had cut into the earth, soft and warm and nothing like the spoiled dark pressing through the woods around us.