Enzo
Nadia slept against my chest with the kind of trust she didn’t give the waking world.
Her hand rested at the base of my throat. Her hair lay across my collarbone, dark against my skin. One knee had found its way between mine sometime in the night, as if even asleep she intended to take ground and keep it.
The bond hummed quietly between us, carrying the same deep, steady warmth it had settled into outside the study and never fully lost.
I memorized the weight of her. The warmth. The breath. The impossible fact of her asleep in my bed while my city held itself together with fear and ward-stones.
The day was going to take pieces of me. I wanted to know what I was carrying into it before it began.
At first light, Geren came to the chamber door. He didn't knock. One scratch against the wood. Low. Brief. The private signal we had used for sixty years when news couldn’t wait for civilized hours.
Every quiet thing in me froze over.
I eased Nadia onto the pillow without waking her, though letting go of her felt like setting down a blade in the dark. She made one small sound and turned her face toward the warmth I had left behind.
I stood there one heartbeat too long. Then I pulled on a robe over bare skin and crossed to the door. I opened it just enough. Geren’s face told me before his mouth did.
“He moved,” I said.
“Twice, my prince.” The words entered the room like cold water.
“Where?”
“The eastern ward-stone in the lower hall. Three hours past midnight. Then the small ward at the second-floor passage above your study. An hour after the first.”
Not the outer wall. Not the stables. Not the gate. The lower hall. The study. The path toward the chamber where Nadia slept. Aldric had walked through my house in the dark and put his hands on the bones of it. My captain. My friend. The man I had trusted at my back for fifteen years.
I felt something in me go quiet enough to become dangerous. “Did the wards hold?”
“Vessa felt both attempts,” Geren said. “Both held. She came to me after the second. We watched him return to his quarters before dawn. He believes he was unobserved.”
I closed my eyes for one breath. Only one. Behind me, the sheets shifted. Nadia had woken.
She didn’t speak. She didn’t move enough for Geren to see her through the crack in the door. But the bond sharpened with her attention, cold and clean as a blade being drawn.
Aldric had touched the wards between her and the rest of the keep. She understood exactly what that meant.
“He doesn't know he was caught,” I said.
“No, my prince.”
“Good.” The word didn’t feel like mine. It was too calm, too final. I drew a slow breath and let the prince settle over the man before the man did something messier. “Send for him.”
Geren waited for the rest.
“I’ll spar with him in the lower yard this morning,” I said. “Tell him I want to work the road out of my shoulders before I take meetings with the household. Eighth bell.”
Geren’s eyes didn’t change. He'd taught me sword work when I was still young enough to believe anger made a blade stronger. He knew every shade of violence I owned. This one, he recognized.
“My prince,” Geren said carefully, studying my face as though measuring how far I had already gone.
“Live steel,” I replied.
For a moment, silence stretched between us. Geren didn’t answer immediately, and I could almost see him weighing the order against everything he knew about me. A confirmation, a final check that this was truly what I intended.
When he spoke, his voice was steady. “Yes, my prince.”
“Clear the yard of everyone unnecessary,” I continued, keeping my tone even, despite the anger coiled beneath it. “Household guard only. Any officers already present at the seat may attend if protocol demands it.”
Geren inclined his head. “Understood.” Then, after a brief pause, he asked, “And the lady?”
At the mention of Nadia, I felt her attention sharpen through the bond behind me, pressing against my back like the touch of a drawn blade. Awake. Listening. Unamused that anyone in this hallway thought she might be placed somewhere safe and ornamental.
“At the balcony,” I said.
The bond went colder at once, a sharp pulse of irritation from Nadia that brushed against my senses, and I nearly smiled despite myself.
“She’ll see the ring,” I continued, unable to keep a hint of amusement from my voice. “And anyone who reacts to it.”
Geren inclined his head, catching more from my expression than my words. “Vessa?” he asked.
“Ringside,” I said. “Quietly.”
“Healer?”
“Present but not visible,” I replied.
“And me?” Geren pressed.
“At the gate,” I said firmly.
His mouth tightened by a fraction. Approval, perhaps. Or grief. With Geren, the two often wore the same face.
“If anything happens to me in the ring,” I said, “you take him alive. I want him able to speak.”
Geren’s gaze held mine. “And if he forces my hand?”
“Then cut what you must and leave him breathing.”
“Understood.”
“Geren.”
He stilled.
“If Vessa reaches him first, don't let her be merciful.”
For the first time, something moved across his face, old and hard with the sorrow of long service. The kind that knew betrayal was never clean when it finally came due.
“Yes, my prince.” He bowed and disappeared down the corridor.
I closed the door softly. For one breath, I kept my hand on the latch. The chamber behind me was warm. Nadia was awake in my bed. Aldric was in the captain’s wing, pretending he hadn't tried to open my house from the inside.
And at the eighth bell, I would put a sword in his hand and make him show me which master he served.
“Live steel,” she said.
I met her hard stare.
Nadia hadn’t moved from the bed, but nothing about her seemed soft now. The sheet lay tangled at her waist. Her hair fell loose over one shoulder. The mark on her cheek caught the thin morning light like a warning.
“Yes,” I said.
Her eyes narrowed. “That's the part I don't like.”
“I gathered.”
She pushed the sheet aside and got out of bed.
There was something uniquely unsettling about watching a furious woman dress in silence. Nadia did it like preparation for murder. Shirt first. Trousers. Boots. Each movement sharp, efficient, stripped of everything except purpose.
The bond was wide open, and what came through it was fire banked under ice.
She dragged her shirt into place with more force than was strictly necessary. I stayed where I was. That felt like the safer choice. For several long seconds, she said nothing at all. The silence was somehow worse.
Then she laughed once. A short, disbelieving sound. “This is your plan? Of all the ones you could make, and this is what you choose?”
I closed my eyes briefly. There it was. “Nadia—”
“No.” She jabbed a finger in my direction, coat hanging half off one shoulder. “Absolutely not. I listened to that entire conversation, Enzo. I heard every fucking word.”
“I know.”
“Good. Then explain to me why hearing that man tried to get into your study and this room led you to the conclusion that he should be given a weapon.”
“My conclusion was that he should be put where I can see him.”
“With steel in his hand,” she shot back.
“With witnesses.”
Her stare could have stripped paint from stone. “Enzo.”
“Nadia,” I said, keeping my voice level.
She made an exasperated noise and shoved her arms through her coat sleeves with enough aggression to suggest she was imagining my neck instead.
For a moment, the room held us suspended between what had already happened and what was coming next. Her anger burned through the bond, sharp and undeniable, while the day waited outside the door with a sword already drawn.
“He's going to try to kill you,” she said.
“I know.”
“That’s not reassuring. You understand that, right?”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
She crossed the room in three quick, furious strides and stopped close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from her skin.
“He has nothing left to lose,” she said. “More than likely, he believes his family's dead. He believes he's already betrayed you past forgiveness. That makes him dangerous in a way loyal men aren't.”
“I’m aware.”
“No,” she snapped. “You're prepared. That’s not the same fucking thing.”
Her eyes locked on mine.
“You're a commander, Enzo. You've spent your life facing men who still think they can win. Men with objectives. Men with orders. Men who believe there's a future on the other side of the fight.”
The bond tightened with the memory she wasn't quite sharing.
“I know what happens when there isn't.”
Her voice went quieter. “By the time people meet me, they're usually already dead. They just don't know it yet.”
The words landed cold.
“He has nothing left,” she continued. “No future. No rank. No family. No way back. That's not a soldier making calculations. That's a cornered man looking for somewhere to put his last breath.”
Her jaw tightened. “And those are the ones who stop caring whether they survive the attempt.”
The words hit cleanly. I let them. Her anger deserved that much.
“Nadia—”
“He touched the wards between me and this room,” she said, voice dropping. “Between you and your study. He wasn't testing stone, Enzo. He was testing access. And you're giving him yours.”
There it was, beneath the anger and the fear she would never admit to carrying.
She'd woken in my bed and heard that Aldric had put his hands on the magic guarding her sleep, and some part of her had taken that personally. Not as an operator or a mercenary.
As mine. As I was hers. The knowledge moved through me with a quiet violence I didn't have time to examine.
“I’m not giving him access,” I said. “I’m taking away his cover.”
“By letting him swing at your throat.”
“By making him choose in front of the household.”
Her jaw flexed. She hated that she understood.
I felt it through the bond, the sharp, irritated shape of her mind finding the same conclusion mine had.
A private arrest would leave whispers. A quiet cell would make a martyr of a traitor.
A hidden execution would rot the seat from the inside for the next decade.