Nadia
The sky above the false queen tore open.
The clouds didn’t part, they split.
A jagged seam ripped through the storm, green-white light pouring from its heart onto the field beneath Kseniya’s feet. The working she’d held for hours came loose all at once, no longer shaped by control, no longer restrained by purpose.
Only grief. Only rage. Only power with nowhere clean to go.
The earth answered.
The courtyard lurched beneath me. Flagstones shifted under my boots as if something massive had turned in its sleep below the keep. Men fell. Horses screamed. Somewhere near the eastern wall, Augustin shouted orders to brace, to fall back, to hold the inner gate.
The storm swallowed half of them.
Vessa’s voice cut down from the upper galleries, raw with a fear I hadn’t known she possessed. “Move!”
Then the field beyond the wall split.
The seam opened between Kseniya’s position and the broken outer gate, a long black wound tearing through earth, bodies, discarded ladders, and stone.
The ground buckled upward in jagged slabs.
Green-white light pulsed beneath it, too bright and too cold, throwing every shadow in the courtyard the wrong direction.
Something began to rise.
First a jagged edge of black stone broke through the torn earth.
Then more of it followed, slick with mud and green-white light, forcing its way upward from whatever lay buried beneath the field.
Strange markings crawled across its surface, glowing and fading too quickly for me to make sense of them.
It kept rising. Higher. Larger. Like some ancient thing waking beneath the world and dragging itself into the open.
Thirty feet. Forty. Fifty.
Still rising, stone grinding against stone as more of its impossible height emerged from the earth, each newly revealed rune blazing brighter than the last. The sight of it seemed to stretch time itself, every heartbeat dragging as the monolith continued its relentless ascent.
Every rune on its surface burned with the heartbeat of the deep.
The gate to Mrachgorod was breaching.
And everything came with it—a poison of shadows spilling through the breach behind the rising monolith.
The first deep-creature pulled itself through the cracked field before the monolith had finished rising.
Long. Pale. Wrong. No face, no eyes, no mercy in the shape of it.
Then another came after it, and another, their jointless limbs dragging over stone and mud with a wet scrape that made every living thing near them recoil.
Wraiths still climbed the broken wall. Shadow Court soldiers pressed every breach. Hounds of the deep came low through the smoke, black muscle and too many teeth, their eyes catching none of the green-white light pouring from the seam.
The courtyard became pure chaos.
Steel on bone. Blood on stone. Screams cut short. Fire guttering blue, then yellow, then blue again as the ward-lines tried to remember what they were supposed to hold against.
Enzo was at my side. Then ahead of me. Then gone in the smoke and back again, gold in the bond, steel in the haze, every movement precise despite the chaos eating the courtyard around us.
I moved with him. Around him. Through the openings he carved and the shadows he left in his wake.
My blade opened a throat before the soldier reached his flank.
I stepped through darkness and took the legs out from under a hound lunging for his back.
I buried a knife beneath the jaw of a Shadow Court soldier who thought the smoke made him invisible.
It didn't. Nothing did. Not from me. Not now.
Enzo cut a hound from a guard’s throat. I caught the second before it reached the man’s belly and opened it from sternum to spine.
He drove his blade through the chest of a Shadow Court soldier coming for my back; I stepped through the dying man’s shadow and came out beneath the arm of the next, slicing tendon, throat, and vanishing before the body hit the stones.
He turned, caught a strike meant for Augustin’s exposed side, and broke the attacker’s arm before opening him from ribs to hip.
I was already beneath the next blade. The bond between us moved faster than words. Left. Down. Mine. Yours.
A warning before a strike. Heat before danger. The shape of his attention brushing mine every time the smoke swallowed him and gave him back.
Alive. Furious. Mine.
Across the courtyard, Kseniya stood beneath my mother’s stolen banner with Zoya on her shoulder and her dead lover’s blood cooling on the stones behind me.
She wasn't looking at the monolith. She was looking at Enzo.
My body knew before my mind did, the bond sharpening.
"Enzo."
Did I say his name? Or scream it?
He turned his head, but it was too late.
Kseniya lifted one hand. Just one. It was a small gesture, almost delicate. The kind of movement a woman made to brush ash from her sleeve or summon a servant closer.
The storm obeyed.
A spear of green-white light tore loose from the seam overhead and crossed the courtyard faster than sound. It didn’t arc. Didn’t waver. Didn’t strike randomly into the defenders or the broken stones or the soldiers between us.
It went for him. Only him.
Enzo saw it coming. He shifted his weight, blade rising, vampire-fast, commander-fast, impossible enough that for one stupid, desperate instant I thought he might turn it. Thought he might do what he always did and survive because the alternative wasn’t something I had agreed to.
His sword met the light, and the blade shattered. The working punched through the steel, through his guard, and straight through the center of his chest.
The bond went white. Pain slammed into me hard enough to buckle my knees.
His.
Clean. Catastrophic. Burning through the bond in a shape I had no language for. Blade, fire, wraith-wrongness—none of it fit. This was deeper. Older. A sovereign working twisted into a weapon and driven straight through the heart of a vampire prince.
Enzo staggered back a step. Only one. His ruined sword fell from his hand and struck the stones in pieces. For a moment, he looked almost surprised.
Then blood spilled from his mouth.
“No.”
The word scraped out of me, small and useless.
The green-white light inside his chest pulsed once. His knees hit the courtyard stones, and the entire world narrowed to that sound.
I moved.
I didn’t remember crossing the distance. One breath, he was thirty paces away. The next, I was on my knees in front of him, catching him before his body could hit the ground.
He was too heavy. Too warm. Too alive.
Still alive.
“Enzo.”
His head tipped forward against my shoulder. His breath came once, sharp and wet. The wound in his chest had become a hole full of light.
The working had gone through his heart and stayed there, burning in the place vampire healing should have already knit shut. Flesh blackened at the edges, green-white veins branching beneath his skin like cracks under ice.
His heart tried to beat. The working stopped it. It tried again.
Stopped.
Again.
Stopped.
“No.” My hands pressed over the wound, as if pressure could hold him together, as if my fingers could argue with magic older than any god I had ever cursed. “No, no, no. Absolutely fucking not.”
The bond lurched. It held, barely, tearing even as it clung.
A sound moved through him, caught between my name and a cry of pain. I dragged his face up between my hands, forcing his gaze to mine. His eyes found me, golden hazel fading in the dying light.
No. No. No.
“You’re not doing this,” I said. “Do you hear me? You’re not doing this to me.”
His mouth moved. A breath. A word. Maybe my name, maybe a warning, maybe something else entirely. But nothing came out.
The bond answered instead.
Nadia.
I felt it rather than heard it, the shape of him brushing against me from inside the bond, weak and fading and still so unbearably himself that something in my chest cracked open.
His hand lifted with effort that should have been impossible. His fingers found my wrist and slid once over my pulse—the same place he’d held me in the chamber, in the woods, at the wall. The same careful touch. The same impossible restraint.
Then the bond filled with him.
Love.
So much of it. Too much.
Everything he'd held back in the courtyard because he'd wanted a room without a body in it. Everything he'd promised to say later. Everything he'd carried since the first time his blood touched my mouth and the world decided neither of us was going to survive the other unchanged.
It came through the bond all at once.
I love you.
My breath broke.
“Say it,” I whispered. “Enzo, say it.”
His fingers tightened weakly around my wrist. He tried. I saw him try. His lips parted. Blood slid over them, dark and shining. But there was no sound, only the bond.
I was going to.
The thought hit harder than the spear had.
I was going to say it back.
A sob tore up my throat, and I hated it. Hated the weakness. Hated the battlefield. Hated the false queen. Hated the gods and the deep and every second I'd wasted pretending this man hadn't become the place I came back to.
“Then say it now,” I ordered. “Say it now, you arrogant bastard.”
His eyes softened.
Softened.
Here, with his heart ruined under my hands and death already reaching through the bond to take him from me, he looked at me like I was the only thing he could still see.
I love you too.
The bond carried it in his voice. The voice beneath the prince, beneath the commander, beneath the Tharros’ Sword.
Just Enzo.
Mine.
I bent over him, trying to shield him from the working with my body, as if death were a blade I could take in his place. As if the universe had ever once cared how badly I wanted something.
His hand slipped from my wrist. I caught it before it fell and pressed it to my cheek.
“No.”
The light in his chest pulsed again, a fractured glow beneath skin and bone. His body bowed beneath my hands, caught between the world and whatever was trying to pull him from it.
The bond screamed.
Then his fear reached me. Sharp. Fleeting. Terrified of leaving me here. Of what I would do after. Of the wound he knew he was making and couldn't stop.
Then sorrow. A deep, aching sorrow that seemed almost out of place amid the blood and violence. It rolled through the bond in a slow, crushing wave, heavy enough to steal the breath from my lungs.
Then apology. Not spoken. Not explained. Just there between us, raw and unmistakable, carrying the weight of something he already knew and I didn’t.
I’m sorry.
“Don’t.”
His breath hitched.
“Don’t apologize to me. Don’t you fucking dare.”
The corner of his mouth moved. Almost. Almost a smile.
Gods, I would have killed kingdoms for the rest of it.
His eyes stayed on mine as the bond thinned between us.
I felt it happen. Felt the golden warmth that had lived beneath my ribs for weeks begin to pull away by increments, like hooks being drawn out of flesh. Like something stitched through me being removed one brutal thread at a time.
“No.” I pressed my forehead to his. “Stay with me.”
Nadia.
“I’m here.”
Another breath. Shallower. Too shallow. The working in his chest flared once more, and this time his heart didn’t try again.
His eyes lost focus.
The bond went silent—not dim or distant, but silent. The absence was immediate and impossible. A hole opened inside me where he had been.
For weeks, Enzo had been there, a blade beneath my ribs. A flame in the dark. A steady, infuriating presence I had cursed and wanted and leaned into and loved before I had been brave enough to say the word aloud.
Now there was nothing.
His body sagged in my arms, heavy and warm.
Empty.
The courtyard kept fighting. Men shouted. Steel rang. The storm screamed above us.
Someone called my name. Maybe Augustin. Maybe Vessa. Maybe the world itself, stupid enough to think I still belonged to it.
I heard none of it.
I held Enzo against me, one hand locked in his blood-soaked coat, the other pressed over the place where his heart had stopped, waiting for the bond to answer.
It didn't.
Waited for his chest to rise. It didn't.
Waited for the universe to remember that I hadn’t agreed to this. It didn't.
The man who’d caught my face in both hands in a burning courtyard and promised me words later was dead in my arms.
The man who’d said he would give me love in a room without a body in it had become the body.
There was no room.
There was no later.
There was only silence.
And it was mine.