Nadia
Ididn’t warn him.
I didn’t ask if he was ready.
I took his hand at the edge of the ring and dragged him into the shadow beneath the arch with every ounce of strength I had left, because if I stayed in that yard one second longer, I would turn around and finish what his mercy had refused.
The shadow swallowed us hard. Tharros’ shadows had grown heavy while we slept. Full of pressure. Full of wrongness. The corruption had been leaning on the deep for weeks, and the deep had been leaning back, and all that weight had settled in the seams between things.
I felt it the moment we crossed.
The shadows knew me. Worse, they wanted me. They wrapped around my wrists, my throat, my ribs, tugging at the sealed place inside me where the deep should have answered. The working over that door groaned beneath the pull, old magic straining under fresh hunger.
For one terrible heartbeat, the dark tried to turn us downward, toward the waiting thing beneath the world.
No. Absolutely fucking not.
I’d just watched Aldric’s blade open Enzo’s side in front of half the household. I’d felt his blood hit the bond. I’d stood on that balcony with my hands locked around stone and every instinct in my body screaming to come through the shadows and put a knife in the captain’s throat.
I hadn’t. For politics. For witnesses. For his cursed, necessary mercy. So the deep could claw at me all it liked. It wasn’t getting me today. It wasn’t getting him, either.
I pulled, and the passage fought back. Enzo was too large for this kind of slipping, too solid, too alive, too much stubborn vampire prince dragged through shadows that didn’t want to carry him. The dark dragged at his shoulders and boots, thick as tar, trying to keep pieces of him in the seam.
He didn’t let go of my hand. Not once. And that almost made me angrier.
The trust of it. The absolute, infuriating certainty that I’d get him through, when he’d just stood in a ring and let a man with nothing left to lose come within a breath of his ribs.
The bond carried nothing from him but controlled pain, quiet trust, and the sharp edge of a question he hadn’t yet dared to ask.
I hated him for that, too. I hated him because he had been right about Aldric.
I hated him because he’d spared him. I hated him because the cut hadn’t been deep, and it didn’t matter.
I saw red on that blade. I saw his blood bloom through leather.
I felt the world narrow to one thought so brutal and simple it had nearly become a prayer.
Mine. Mine. Mine.
The shadows bucked. I snarled and drove my will through them. I wasn’t elegant or clean or careful. I shoved command into the dark with both hands and the full force of everything I hadn’t been allowed to do in that yard.
The seam tore open, and we hit the bedchamber hard enough that Enzo’s shoulder struck the wall beside the hearth.
Good. Let the wall take him. Better the wall than Aldric’s blade.
The fire had been banked low. The bedding was still rumpled from where we had left it. The chamber smelled of woodsmoke, lavender, and blood.
His blood.
Still warm. Still moving down his ribs beneath the ruined leather. My vision narrowed to the red.
Enzo’s hands came to my hips, steadying but not stopping me. The bond had carried my fury through the shadows. He knew better than to mistake this for calm.
“Take it off,” I said.
“Nadia—”
I shoved him harder against the stone. “Take. It. Off.”
His jaw flexed.
Then, because the arrogant bastard actually did have survival instincts when he bothered to use them, he dropped his hands from me and unfastened the ruined practice coat.
Too slowly—as if he thought one wrong move might send me over the edge and straight for his throat. I made a sound I didn't recognize and tore the rest open myself.
Buttons scattered. Leather gave. The shirt beneath dragged up beneath my hands, and there it was—the cut across his ribs, longer than I had seen from the balcony, blood dark along the edges where Aldric’s blade had gone through leather and into muscle.
Not deep enough to kill him now. Vampires healed too quickly for that. But as I stared at the angry red line across his ribs, I couldn't stop wondering how deep Aldric's blade had gone when it first struck, before the wound had begun knitting itself back together.
My hands shook, and I hated them for it.
His expression changed for half a breath. The mask he wore for everyone else slipped, leaving only Enzo—the man who wanted to reach for me. Soothe me. Say something careful and noble and entirely useless.
“Don't,” I snapped.
He went still. Smart.
I bit into the side of my palm, hard enough for pain to bloom sharp and immediate. There was nothing practiced about it, only teeth and fury and the desperate need to put all that helpless rage somewhere. Skin split beneath the pressure, and blood welled warm against my mouth.
“Baby, don—”
“Don't you dare baby me,” I growled, pressing my bleeding palm over the cut.
The bond flared, the familiar steady warmth between us turning into a surge. A shockwave.
His blood had been in me since the wraith fight. Mine entered him now through the wound, and whatever lived between us answered with a violence neither vampire healing nor Shadow Fae magic had language for.
For one dizzying instant, I felt the sharp sting of his wound beneath my hand, his relief as the pain began to ease, the exhaustion he had carried since dawn beneath duty and stubbornness, and the lingering adrenaline from the duel still racing through his veins.
Beneath all of it, I found him.
The fear he'd buried the moment Aldric’s blade struck hadn't been for himself. It had been for me—for what I would have done if he lost control of the situation, for what it would have cost me if I’d stepped into that yard, for the look on my face when his blood punched through the bond.
The realization hit hard enough to steal my breath.
He'd felt my panic. Every second of it. Every frantic, helpless heartbeat from the balcony. Every murderous thought. Every ounce of terror.
The cut began to close beneath my hand. Slowly. Too slowly.
I leaned in, pressing harder, feeling the torn muscle knit beneath my palm, feeling his breath catch as pain and relief dragged through him at once.
The bond carried all of it. His restraint. His guilt. His unbearable, infuriating trust. And something else now. A fierce, aching gratitude that I was here. That I was touching him. That he was alive to feel it.
Then I grabbed his face with my bloody hand and dragged his mouth to mine.
The kiss wasn’t soft. I didn't want soft. Soft was for people who hadn’t watched the man they were absolutely not supposed to be falling for bleed in public because a political lesson required red ink.
None of that mattered here. Here, he was mine. Here, I could touch him. Here, I could prove with my hands and mouth and every furious inch of me that the world hadn’t taken him while I was forced to watch.
I bit his lower lip. He made a sound against my mouth, rough and low, and his hands tightened at my hips hard enough to bruise.
Good. I wanted bruises. I wanted proof. I wanted every mark his hands could leave, every breath he dragged out of me, every bit of heat that would burn the sight of Aldric’s blade from my mind.
My coat hit the floor. His shirt followed. His belt. My belt. We stripped each other with none of the patience he had used the night before. That tenderness had belonged to a room where we had believed we might have one quiet hour before the world came for us again.
This wasn’t that room anymore. This room held blood. This room held fury. This room held him alive under my hands, and I needed him so badly I could barely breathe around it.
Enzo lifted me, pinning me against the wall beside the hearth, right where I'd put him. His hands locked beneath my thighs, my legs wrapped around his waist, and his mouth went to my throat like he could taste every terrible thing I had swallowed in that yard.
The stone was freezing against my back, but Enzo was an inferno at my front.
The bond opened wide enough to make the room tilt. Every shield, every practiced cruelty, every useful piece of distance I'd ever kept between myself, and wanting simply vanished beneath the force of him.
He paused, and I didn’t know why I was surprised. Even now. Even with his breath ragged and his eyes dark gold and his body pressed so hard against mine that I could feel exactly how much restraint was costing him.
His gaze locked on mine. He wouldn't move until I gave him the words, the bastard. The good, honorable, impossible bastard.
“Take me,” I said. My voice broke on it, and I didn't give that first fuck. “Now.”
He drove into me hard enough that my head struck the wall and my breath shattered. I held on to him with both arms, nails biting into his shoulders, and met every thrust like it was a fight I intended to win.
It was too much. It wasn't enough. It would never be enough.
The bond doubled everything—the stretch, the heat, the drag of his mouth along my throat, the brutal rhythm of his hips, the desperate shape of his need answering mine until I couldn't tell where my fury ended and his began.
His fangs grazed the curve of my shoulder, and my whole body clenched.
“Do it,” I whispered, craving his bite, needing it more than I needed air.
He paused for half a heartbeat. Then his teeth sank into me, breaking me wide open.
Pain, pleasure, blood, bond—all of it struck at once, bright enough to blind. I came apart against him with his name in my mouth and his fangs in my shoulder, my body locking around his while the bond burned white and wild between us.
He followed three strokes later, his hand at the back of my neck, his mouth sealed over the mark he'd made, holding me through it like he could keep the whole world out by refusing to let go.