Nadia #3
It stretched unnaturally across the stones, seized by his magic, pinning my balance half a heartbeat behind where my body wanted to move. An old Shadow Court trick. Elegant. Cruel. Difficult to break when injured.
My guard was wrong. My footing was worse. Blood ran slick beneath my collar, and the cut in my thigh made the stones shift under me as if the courtyard itself had decided to become treacherous.
I tore at the binding, but the shadow held.
I had maybe a third of a second.
Enough time to know I wasn't going to stop it.
Enough time to think of Enzo.
Not in the grand, tragic way stories liked to imagine. Not of everything we had survived together, or everything we might have had.
Just the promise.
His voice in our rooms. His hand around mine. That look he got when he was trying very hard not to sound afraid.
Take yourself into account. For once.
I'd promised him I would. And here I was, bleeding, exhausted, standing in front of a killing stroke because I had thrown myself toward every fire in the courtyard and trusted I could survive it.
I should have been more careful. I should have remembered that my life belonged to more than just me now. The regret hit harder than the fear.
Not that I was about to die. That I was about to leave him with the consequences of my failure.
The blade came down and I closed my eyes.
Enzo. I'm sorry.
But it didn't land.
Enzo reached us like violence remembering my name.
He came through the smoke from the eastern side of the courtyard, not as a prince, not as a commander, but as the answer to the bond screaming for him. One instant my father’s blade was descending toward my chest.
The next, Enzo was there.
His hand closed around my father’s sword wrist.
The killing stroke broke off its line, the point skidding past my collarbone close enough to cut the leather already soaked with my blood. Two finger-widths lower and it would have opened my throat.
Enzo’s own blade drove up under the consort’s ribs.
Fast. Clean. Final.
My father’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. The antlered headdress slipped backward as his knees failed. His formal blade fell from his hand and struck the stones with a delicate little sound that had no place in war.
Enzo let him slide off the steel.
The man who’d given me life landed on his back in the courtyard of my bonded mate’s keep. The antlers rolled away and came to rest against the boot of a dead soldier.
His chest moved once. Twice. Then stopped.
For a moment, I felt nothing. Not relief. Not grief. Only a strange, hollow surprise.
Not that he was dead. That I wasn’t breaking.
Enzo stepped back, breathing hard, blood on his coat that wasn’t his. His eyes found mine through the smoke, and the bond opened between us without caution or apology.
He’d felt the fifth strike. He’d felt the moment I knew I wouldn’t stop it. He’d crossed the courtyard with that knowledge tearing through him.
I crossed to him.
A Shadow Court soldier came at me from the left. I cut him down without looking. Another rose behind me, and Enzo’s blade left his hand in a clean throw that buried itself in the man’s throat before he reached my back.
The body folded.
Enzo retrieved the blade. For one long breath, neither of us spoke.
My father’s eyes were open. The same color I remembered but unfocused now. His mouth was slack. Blood pooled beneath his ribs and thinned at the edges, black-red against the stones. He seemed, in death, exactly as he had in life.
Cold. Composed. Distant.
He hadn’t seen me. Even at the end, he’d looked past me. At the crown. At the strategy. At whatever use I might have served if the bargain had gone his way. That was probably the truest thing he’d ever given me.
Enzo crossed to me without a glance at the cuts, cupped my face in both hands, and kissed me.
It wasn’t soft or careful. It was the kiss of a man who’d just felt his bonded mate a heartbeat from death and needed proof she was still alive before he could think about anything else.
His hands were tight against my jaw, his mouth demanding, the bond flung wide open between us.
Through it came the raw terror he’d carried across the courtyard and the equally fierce relief of finding me standing.
I let him have it. I needed it, too.
He kissed me until the bond settled into something resembling function again, then rested his forehead against mine for a single breath, eyes closed.
"You're bleeding. Again."
"Yes."
"I swear to the gods if you tell me it's decorative, I will fucking lose it," Enzo snapped.
"Enzo," I said, exasperated.
"What?" he shot back.
I had to find the words. They weren’t waiting in my mouth the way the operator's words always waited.
He felt me reaching for them through the bond and went still.
"I love you," I said quietly.
For a single suspended breath, neither of us moved.
"I know," he said, rougher than before.
"I told you once. In the chamber. After Aldric."
"I remember."
"I wanted you to hear it again. Out loud. Not in passing. While I'm still bleeding and the courtyard is still on fire and you can feel me through the bond. I wanted you to hear it now."
"I heard it," he murmured.
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
"I'll say it back to you in a room without a body in it," he said softly. "Not here. Not in this. But you've been hearing it through the bond for days, and I'll give you the words when there's air for them."
"Can't wait," I said.
The corner of his mouth twitched. I felt it through the bond before I saw it.
Then I bent and closed my father’s eyes.
The gesture was for me, not for him.
The man who’d been my father in name only had never stood in my doorway when I couldn’t sleep in the dark halls of Mrachgorod. He’d never turned toward the small sounds children made when they woke from nightmares. He’d never paused at my door long enough to be anything but a shadow moving away.
I closed his eyes now not because he deserved it, but because I needed the reminder that I was still capable of mercy. He’d earned nothing from me—not after my mother, not after a lifetime of absence and indifference. The gesture was small, pointless, and entirely for my own sake.
When I stood, Enzo touched my shoulder once—the quiet weight of his hand in acknowledgment, the simple truth that he’d seen this with me.
That was all I could bear.
Anything more would have broken against the raw place inside me.
Then the storm tore itself open.
Across the courtyard, beyond the smoke and bodies and the ragged line of defenders still holding the inner gate, Kseniya had gone utterly still.
Maybe she saw through the corvid circling above the keep. Maybe the working told her. Maybe whatever passed between her and the man she’d chosen over a queen snapped when his life left him.
However death reached her, it reached.
For two hours, the storm above the field had moved with purpose. It had gathered where she commanded. Lowered when she threatened. Carried her voice when she spoke.
Now it convulsed.
Green-white flashes raced through the clouds like veins of lightning beneath sickly skin. The wind rose, sharp and wrong, dragging smoke sideways across the courtyard. The Shadow Court contingent around her froze, and for one heartbeat, even the wraiths seemed to pause.
Kseniya lifted her face to the sky and raised both hands. The thing beneath her feet answered at once, a deep pulse rolling through the earth. The ground trembled—the vast weight of the world beneath the field stirring in response.
Stone shifted beneath my boots. Somewhere behind me, a guard swore. A horse screamed again, but this time the sound cut off halfway through, swallowed by a deeper groan rising from beneath the outer wall.
The bond at my side went sharp as the truth hit Enzo.
He knew it the instant I did. We had one breath—barely enough time to meet each other’s gaze—before the storm above the false queen broke open.