Like a melody she could not stop from ringing through her head, Mehmed arose in her memories. He knew why. He alone understood this drive, this ambition, this need to have her country. She could not abandon it, because Wallachia was her. If she could walk away from Wallachia, if she could leave it to others, she would not be. It was as simple as that.
“Will you stay with me?” This time she did not have an elbow to his throat. She held out a hand instead, staring at his hazel eyes, still trying to figure out how they had changed. As he put his hand on hers, she realized what it was that had been missing since the day she attacked him.
Nicolae no longer hoped.
His optimism, cloaked in dark and bloody humor, had been a constant in her life. He was a man who was staring at his own death. She had seen men look at her that way before, but always when she was holding a blade. Not when she was holding their hand.
“Nicolae, I—”
The bridge fell with a tremendous cracking splash into the river below. Nicolae and Lada shifted to look. “Oh,” Nicolae said, stumbling into Lada’s side. She staggered under his weight.
“What are you—”
Nicolae glanced over his shoulder, then shoved Lada to the ground. He flinched, dropping to his knees.
“What is the matter with you?” Lada demanded, sitting up.
Nicolae fell forward.
Two crossbow bolts were embedded in his back. Dark circles of blood bloomed outward along his tunic. Lada scanned the tree line, where a man fumbled a third bolt. She leapt over Nicolae and sprinted, screaming. The assassin loaded the bolt.
Her knife found his neck before his finger found the trigger.
She slashed his throat, then followed him to the ground, stabbing again and again and again. Only when his glassy eyes stare
d up at the sky, lifeless, and her hand dripped with his blood did she stop.
Part of her wanted to run back. To help Nicolae up.
The other part of her knew exactly what it meant when blood spread that fast, when bolts hit those parts. Those bolts had been meant for her. The first he had taken by accident as they turned toward the falling bridge. But he had taken the second on purpose. Maybe there was still time to say thank you. To berate him for being so stupid. To say she was sorry. But she did not want to say any of those things.
Not when they were the same as saying goodbye.
She ran toward him anyway, each footstep a breath, each footstep a heartbeat, each footstep an eternity.
Dropping to his side, she lifted his head onto her lap. He gazed up at her, his ugly, beloved face pale. She pushed his hair back, stroking his forehead. The blood from her hands smeared across his skin and she panicked at the sight. She needed to clean him up, to get that blood off him. There was a tremendous pressure behind her eyes, a tightening of her throat that made it hard to speak.
“You would follow me to the ends of the earth, you said.” She held his gaze, though his eyes were going unfocused. “I am holding you to that. We are very far from the ends of the earth.”
Nicolae’s grin spread slower than the blood pooling beneath him. “No, Lada. I am already there. I beat you, is all.”
“Be careful, or I really will display your head on a pike.”
Nicolae laughed.
And then he died.
* * *
“But who was the assassin working for?” Bogdan asked. He sat at a table in the corner of the kitchen along with Daciana, Oana, and Stefan. The scent of freshly turned dirt clung to them, as did the memory of lowering Nicolae’s body into the ground only an hour before.
Lada kicked a chair. It skittered across the uneven stone floor before tipping and clattering to the ground. “It does not matter who he was working for!”
“It might have been better to take him alive and get information,” Daciana said. “Then we would know who wanted you dead.”
“Who does not want me dead? That would be a shorter list.” Lada paced, prowling the length of the room, angry and devastated, wanting to do something, anything, to stop feeling this way. She rubbed at her arms to keep from tearing at her hair.
The last time she had lost one of her men, it had been Petru, killed in this very castle. That still hurt. But Nicolae. Nicolae she had depended on, had needed in a way she needed very few people. And even though she had doubted him, he remained loyal to her until the end. He had found his end because of his loyalty to her.