Lada did not know how her men would feel about taking up with the Ottomans yet again. Some harbored less ill will toward their onetime captors and benefactors; others hated them. Doubtless some would prefer to fight for Constantinople than at the sides of Ottomans. But she was their leader. They joined her to take back Wallachia, and she did not need permission to make decisions. If they did not like it, they were welcome to make their own way.
Her way was forward, to the throne, however she got there.
“You are supposed to be patrolling on the other end of camp,” she snapped.
Though she could not see his face, she could practically feel Bogdan’s blunt smile. “You did not answer my question.”
“Because I do not have to. I am leaving. I will be back. That is everything you need to know.”
“Something is wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong!” All day she had been on edge, knowing how close Mehmed was. She was not certain of the precise location of his camp, but she knew it was within a few miles of where she stood now. Mehmed was within a few miles, not separated by rivers and countries and the year that had come between them. She thought she had hidden her agitation well, but apparently not.
“I will go with you.”
“No!” Not Bogdan. Anyone but Bogdan. Lada could not face him if he found out what she was doing. Admitting it felt like asking permission, and she refused to do that. Besides, she remembered Bogdan’s thinly veiled distaste for Mehmed. She did not want to bring that along with her. “I must go alone.”
“Why?”
“Get back to your patrol.”
Bogdan stood, unmoving, for five eternally long breaths. Then he walked off into the night.
Lada hurried through the dark, knives back in both hands. She had a lot of ground to cover. It would have been easier on a horse, but that would have drawn even more attention to her departure. Still, after an hour crisscrossing through the terrain, looking for signs of a camp, Lada found herself slowing down. She wished she could enjoy walking alone—solitude was not a luxury she had much of lately—but she knew what awaited her.
Who awaited her.
And she did not know how to feel about seeing him again after so long apart. She had not been able to sort through her feelings, to separate what was real and what was merely a reaction to the circumstances of her childhood. What if she saw Mehmed and felt nothing? Worse, what if she saw Mehmed and felt everything as acutely as she had when they were together? It had been a hard thing, leaving him. Would this reopen the wound?
Before she could settle her emotions, she saw the familiar white cap of a Janissary. It glowed in the moonlight. Annoyance flickered through Lada. They should know better than to wear those white caps at night. If she were an assassin, this sentry would already be dead.
A slow, vicious smile spread across her face. She had planned on walking into the camp and announcing herself. She was not expected tonight—Mehmed had merely said where they would be. There had been no specific time to meet established.
It was a night to play “Kill the Sultan.”
She generously decided not to hurt any sentries. They would probably be punished for their failure to detect her, but they deserved that. The first was easily skirted. The second and third announced their approach with a cacophony of snapping twigs. Closer to camp, the going was more difficult. The tents were packed close, and under cover of trees. Between the trees and the darkness, Lada could not get a sense for how many men Mehmed had brought. It did not seem like enough. He probably had them spread out, though. That was what she would have done.
She pressed into the deeper darkness behind a tent as two Janissaries walked by, talking in quiet voices. She had an odd stirring of something that felt like nostalgia at hearing Turkish again. Scowling, she gripped her knives harder.
Mehmed’s tent might as well have had his name painted on it. It was the largest, made of sumptuous cloth in what she assumed would be red and gold in the sunlight. That was another mistake. If she were in charge, he would be sleeping in one of the small, anonymous tents. Make an assassin look through every tent, rather than boldly advertising the target.
He really did make this too easy.
Lada peered around the edge of a soldier’s tent from which gentle snores emanated. The entrance to Mehmed’s grand tent was manned by two Janissaries, both awake and alert. Lada slipped around to the back of the tent, which was guarded only by her friend darkness.
She darted forward, not hesitating as she stabbed a knife into the tent and dragged it down. With only the barest whisper of material, she had her own private entrance.
Inside, it was dim, a coal brazier in the corner giving only a faint glow. Lada wondered who had to carry the furniture Mehmed traveled with: a desk, a stool, a full table, an assortment of pillows, and a bed. No bedrolls for the sultan, whose body was too precious for the ground.
And whose body was in that bed, breathing softly.
Lada crept forward with her knife raised. And then she stopped, looking down at Mehmed.
She had forgotten the thick sweep of his black lashes. His full lips were turned down at the corners, as though his dreams troubled him. His hair, so often covered by turbans the past few years, was draped on his pillow, one strand lying across his forehead. Lada was filled with a sudden tenderness. She reached out and brushed the hair from his skin.
He awoke with a start, grabbing her wrist. His eyes were wide, body tensed for a fight. Lada leaned closer. She had never seen this ferocity in his face. She wanted to taste it.
Mehmed kept his painful grip on her wrist. “Lada?” he asked, blinking rapidly.
“I have just killed you. Again.”
He pulled her down, meeting her lips with desperate hunger. She dropped the knife. She had forgotten what it was to be kissed, to be desired. She had thought she did not need it.
She had been wrong.
Mehmed moved from her lips to her neck, his hands in her hair. “When you left, you took my heart with you. Kill me, Lada,” he said, with so much longing she could not keep her own hands off him. He rolled so she was beneath him. His hands explored her body, alternating between rough greediness and softness so gentle it nearly hurt her.
He put his mouth against her ear. “I have learned some things,” he said, voice teasing, “about pleasure.”
Before she could wonder where he had learned those things—things she had accused him of not caring about aside from his own satisfaction—he moved down her body. Her back arched as his hands slid under her tunic and up her torso. She grabbed his hair, not knowing whether she wanted to pull him away or draw him closer. She feared if he continued, she would lose control. She had never let herself lose control before.
His hands found the space between her legs and she cried out with the shock and intensity of it. He responded with greater eagerness, kissing her stomach, her breasts. He pulled her tunic up higher, and, impatient with his clumsiness, she tugged it off herself. They had done this much before, but absence had made every sensation stronger. This was where she had always stopped him, where she had always drawn the line so that she stayed in charge of what they did. So that she remained hers, and hers alone.
She did not stop him.
He pulled off his own nightshirt. He wore nothing underneath.
He unlaced her trousers and pulled them off. She thought he would try to put himself inside her, and thought—maybe—she wanted him to.
Instead, he lifted her legs and kissed her, and kissed her, and kissed her where she had never imagined being kissed. Lada’s control fled on the wave of pleasure, and she did not miss it. She cried out like a wounded thing, but Mehmed put a hand over her mouth as he shifted on top of her.
She let him.
21
Late March
“HOW MANY ANGELS can dance on the head of a pin?” a man shouted, a sneer deforming his pockmarked face.
Another man jabbed his finger into the first man’s chest, screaming something about the Father and the Son. The pockmarked man threw a punch, and then they were wrestling on the muddy street, biting and kicking.
Cyprian did not even pause as he steered Radu around them.
“People here are very … religious?”
Cyprian laughed darkly. “To all our downfall. There she is.” He pointed. With nothing else to do for the day, Radu had asked to see more of the city. He wanted to see the fabled Hagia Sophia cathedral in particular. Mehmed had told him to visit. It had been his only actual instruction. And until Constantine called for him again, there was not much he could do besides wander with his eyes and ears open.