Enzo #2
Her mouth almost moved. “That was the plan.”
She dismounted before I could lift her down, which told me exactly how much she needed to feel useful. I let her have it for the moment.
The shadows at the base of the outer wall darkened as she crossed the courtyard. They leaned toward her like they knew her. Like they’d been waiting. Whatever stirred in the stone as Nadia passed, it was something older than a fresh tuning and far less easy to explain.
She disappeared beneath the archway, folding into the shadows, and I lingered over the spot she disappeared for far too long before retreating to my study.
The sendings waited on my desk. The first had arrived two days ago from Velen’s Cross on the southern coast road.
My prince,
Two wraiths have been sighted north of the holding. We engaged one. It killed three of the watch before we put it down. We expect more. Gates closed against the night.
Send what you can.
It was eight days old. I crushed the edge of the parchment in my hand hard enough to wrinkle it before forcing my fingers to unclench. The urge to put my fist through the desk came sharp and immediate.
Eight days. Eight fucking days. Three men dead while I rode blind through my own province.
I set the sending down with far more force than necessary.
The second had arrived yesterday from Iron Hill. I knew the seal before I broke the wax.
I’d stood on Iron Hill as a boy and listened to my grandfather tell me that stone remembered the hands that raised it. Four towers. Forty soldiers. A witch sworn into service. A deep cistern. Walls eight feet thick. The strongest point on the western road.
I opened the sending.
My prince,
The Iron Hill has fallen.
For a moment, the words became the whole room. Then I forced myself to read the rest.
I write from the village below with what remains of the garrison. The wraiths came two nights ago. We held the upper rooms for one night. The captain is dead. The witch is dead. The watch is dead. Six of us remain. The villagers are sheltering with us in the inn.
Send help.
I read it once. Then again. Then a third time. By the third, the words had begun to blur as rage permeated every part of me.
The parchment crackled in my hand. I hadn’t realized how hard I was gripping it until the seal split beneath my thumb and a corner tore away.
The Iron Hill. Four towers. Forty soldiers. A fealty-sworn witch. Walls thick enough to withstand a siege. Gone in one night.
My grandfather had stood on those battlements and told me they would outlast us all. My father had inspected them every decade. I’d sent men there—good men. Men whose names I knew.
Now they were all dead.
Six survivors. Six. A village of two hundred souls trapped in an inn that wouldn’t hold while I sat three days away reading about it after the fact.
Something hit the desk. For a heartbeat, I thought it had come from somewhere else. Then I realized it was my fist. The inkpot rattled. The lamp jumped. Pain shot through my hand, and I welcomed it.
The alternative was putting my fist through the fucking wall or finding the nearest living thing and demanding an explanation no one could give me.
I forced myself to breathe. Once. Again. The room felt too small. The keep felt too small. My skin felt too tight.
The Iron Hill had fallen, and I hadn’t been there. I hadn’t even known.
The third sending waited beneath it. Court wax. My father’s network. I gritted my teeth and broke the seal.
The king rides for Tharros. He will arrive within the week.
The knife is already drawn.
I stared at those words longer than the others.
My father didn’t use that phrase lightly. He used it when the truth had become too large to send. When names couldn’t be trusted to paper. When the knife was no longer hidden in the sleeve but ready to draw blood.
The knife is already drawn.
My father was coming. The Iron Hill had fallen. Velen’s Cross was closing its gates. Mireya had the working beneath her skin. Aldric slept under my roof with treason in his shadow.
Nadia was somewhere inside my keep, testing wards I’d believed sufficient because arrogance was apparently hereditary.
For one dangerous moment, I wanted to put my fist through the desk and be done with all of it.
Instead, I breathed. Once. Again. Then I forced the anger back into its cage. I knew what came next.
Orders. Riders. Reinforcements. Healers. Reports from the western road. A private message to my father. A quiet investigation into every servant who’d crossed paths with Mireya. A net around Aldric so tight he wouldn’t realize it had closed until he tried to move.
I’d spent centuries learning how to carry disasters one task at a time. But for a moment, I sat behind that desk and stared at the sendings.
At Iron Hill. At my father riding toward Tharros. At the fear spreading through my city. And all I could think was that everything I touched seemed to be breaking faster than I could reach it.
Then Nadia returned.
She stepped into the study twenty minutes after I’d finished reading the sendings. Her coat was still dusty from the road, her hair half-loose from the ride, the pale mark on her cheek stark in the lamplight.
She closed the door behind her, and the click of the latch sounded obscenely final, and I rose to meet her.
She looked at the sendings on the desk then at me. “How bad?”
“The Iron Hill has fallen.”
Her face froze. “Fuck.”
“Yes.”
“What else?”
“My father is coming.”
Something changed in her eyes. Calculation. Understanding. The grim understanding that whatever waited at the heart of this had begun to move openly. She took one step toward me.
I crossed the room before she took the second. I’d intended to speak. To tell her the rest. To ask what she found. To be the prince for one more breath. Then her hand touched my chest.
And that was the end of every civilized thing left in the room.
I caught her face in both hands and kissed her hard, with none of the care or softness a man used when he meant to reassure. I kissed her like the city was afraid, the roads were bleeding, my father was riding toward war, and she was the only thing inside my walls that still made sense.
She answered immediately. Gods, she answered.
Her hands went to my belt with vicious efficiency, and mine were already at the front of her coat, tearing at buttons, leather, laces, anything between my skin and hers.
The coat hit the floor. Her tunic followed. The thin linen beneath it tore in my hands, and she made a sound against my mouth that nearly ended me where I stood.
My belt came loose. Her fingers dragged through my hair and pulled my mouth to the side of her throat. A command. A plea. A warning. Possibly all three.
“Nadia.”
“I know.”
She did. The bond was wide open between us, carrying far too much. Fear. Fury. Relief. Need. Her answering hunger, sharp as a blade and just as honest.
I turned her. Her front hit the inside of the study door, one hand bracing against the wood, the other reaching back for me. I caught it, dragged it above her head, and pinned it there with mine.
She stilled for half a breath. Then she arched back into me.
Fuck.
There was nothing fragile in that movement. Nothing uncertain. She was all heat and demand and bare throat, all scarred skin and sharp breath and want she had no intention of hiding from me.
I shoved her leathers down just far enough. Not neatly. Not carefully. Careful had died somewhere between the Iron Hill and the moment she touched my chest like she knew exactly what was breaking in me.
My mouth found the place where her neck met her shoulder. I felt her pulse there. Fast. Alive. Mine.
My fangs pierced her flesh just enough to mark. Enough to taste blood and heat and the proof that she was still here under my hands, still breathing, still cursing softly into the door as her body opened to mine and the bond burned white between us.
Her knees nearly gave, and I caught her with an arm around her waist, holding her up as I pressed into her.
Nadia’s breath broke in a moan I felt down my spine. For one second, neither of us moved.