Nadia #3
I closed my eyes. Cowardly, maybe, but practical. Looking at him was becoming a problem. He kept going anyway.
“I don’t give a fuck what job you were doing.
I don’t give a fuck what the math says. I don’t give a fuck whether the wraith was patrolling toward the column, toward me, or toward anyone else.
” His voice dropped lower. “I want you breathing. That’s the equation.
That’s the only fucking equation I will accept from you. ”
“That’s not how this works.”
“That’s exactly how this works now.”
“Because you decided?”
“Yes.”
My eyes opened. His were not soft. Good. Soft might have broken me.
“I am your mate,” he said. “I'm not asking you to become useless. I'm not asking you to abandon the work. I'm telling you that you no longer get to spend yourself like a coin no one will miss.”
My chest ached.
“You’re going to learn,” he said, “or we're going to keep having this fight until the math in your head changes.”
“That sounds fucking exhausting.”
“Marriage is hard sometimes.”
I blinked. He didn't. “You've just survived your first hard fight. We have a thousand ahead of us.”
A laugh tried to leave me. It came out wet and unsteady and not nearly insulting enough. His gaze dropped to my mouth. For one reckless second, I thought he would kiss me.
Worse, I wanted him to.
I wanted the anger. The proof. The hard, living weight of him reminding both of us that I was here, still breathing, still mine and his and not whatever the wraith had tried to make me.
His hand tightened at my neck. Then stopped. The bond went sharp with restraint.
“Not here,” he said.
My pulse tripped. “Developing standards now?”
His mouth almost curved. Almost. “Not in a camp I no longer trust. Not with Aldric ten tents away pretending he is not listening for weakness.”
Oh. That shouldn’t have hit me where it did.
He leaned closer, his voice dropping into something quieter and far more dangerous. “When I touch you like that again, Nadia, no one hears it but me.”
Well. Fuck.
“Possessive,” I whispered.
“No.” His thumb brushed the edge of my jaw, careful of the scar. “Possessive comes later. This is strategy.”
“Veyne.”
“And fury,” he added. “Do not mistake the restraint for mercy.”
My mouth went dry. Absolutely unfair.
He released me before I could decide whether to kiss him or call him an arrogant bastard.
Then he began undressing me. Carefully. That was worse.
He removed my coat first, then my vest, then the blood-stiff shirt beneath. Every motion was precise. Controlled. He checked the closed wound at my shoulder. The inside of my wrist where the tendril had wrapped. The edge of my jaw where the wraith had reached for me.
Then he kissed each one—the shoulder, the wrist, the scar beneath my eye—with a reverence so quiet it hurt worse than anger.
I had no clever comment for that.
When he was done, he wrapped me in his clean shirt and pulled me down with him onto the bedroll. His back settled against the tent pole, and I ended up between his legs, my back against his chest, his arms around me.
Outside, the camp moved in low, careful sounds. Fires crackling. Horses shifting. Men speaking softly near the ward line. Somewhere across the camp, Aldric sat by his second lamp and wrote in whatever ledger men like him used when they wanted betrayal to look like duty.
Inside the tent, Enzo held me like the world had personally offended him and he intended to take it up with someone eventually. I pressed my face against his chest. His chin came to rest on the top of my head. The bond settled around us.
Neither of us slept. Not for a long time.
I thought about my mother as she'd been before the crown and the blood and the century of running.
The way she'd braided my hair when I was small.
The way she laughed when my uncle told a terrible joke at dinner.
The way she'd stood at the window of her chamber, looking down at the Court below, and said, when I was perhaps six, “One day you will stand here, Mrachenya. You will look at them the way I do. You will be theirs the way I am theirs.”
I hadn't understood her then.
I did now.
The throne had never been a chair to my mother. It had been them—the people, the Court below the window, the guards on the wall, the villagers in the fields, Soren on the floor beside her body, and the deep bleeding for a hundred years because there had been no sovereign left to hold the seal.
She had been theirs.
That was what queen meant to her.
People.
I had been refusing the throne because I'd mistaken it for the thing that killed her. It hadn't killed her. Greedy people thirsty for a throne had. The kind of people who would burn a kingdom to possess a crown.
The bond carried the shape of that realization to Enzo. He didn't interrupt. He didn't press. He only held me while the word shifted inside my chest, no longer a blade pointed at my throat, no longer a trap baited with my mother’s blood.
Queen.
I didn't say it aloud. Not yet. But the word lifted its head and faced me.
And this time, I didn't look away.