Page 32 of Fated to the Fang

"From your own people."

"Yes."

"There's a woman you haven't met who runs the council. She controls the law. Then there's a man running the rogues. Three hundred years ago he carried a banner and a belief—that we should stop hiding. Stop bowing to people who'd kill us. Come into the open and rule the thing we'd been running from. He was my younger brother. Lucien."

She catches the tense before I do.

"Was."

"I ended his rebellion. I dug his grave and stood at it every year since. I believed I'd killed the last person alive who shared my blood. The last one to rebel against the council. But I just learned that grave is empty. The rocks showed me. Through a mnemosigil. We can touch the rocks where sigils have been left and they give us the real truths. It told me he's alive. He's the one causing the stir. Coming for people. Coming for you."

"You killed your brother to keep this town from learning you exist, and he came back to drain it."

"Yes."

She lets it settle, and I let her have the quiet.

"There's one more thing, and it's the one you'll trust least, so I'll hand it to you plainly and you can do what you want with it. The first night I sensed you here, something in me recognized you. We have a word for it. A mate bond. It's rare—most of us live forever and never feel it—and it runs both ways or not at all. It's ancient. Most believed it to be extinct. The oldest elders kept it in law as a warning, not a promise. A dead thing preserved because dead things can still be useful in court. It sharpens what passes between two people. Truth. Memory. The weight of being near."

"Recognized me as what."

"Not as a thing I own. It isn't ownership. It doesn't reach inside you and turn a key. It does not make you want me, trust me, or stay. Not for a human. Not for a vampire. It can sharpen what is already there, but it cannot create obedience. If it could, you would not be standing there hating me so precisely."

Something in her loosens half an inch, then refuses the rest.

"You hid this too."

"I hid it hardest. A human the council would end for it—and she's bonded to the man who put down the last rebellion. To them you stop being a person and become a liability with my name on it. So I buried it. I made decisions over your head because I was afraid of the one I couldn't make for you."

"Did I consent to it?" she asks. "To you feeling me through some invisible thread? To me touching you, sleeping with you, while you knew there was another layer to it and I didn't?"

"No," I say. "You didn't consent to knowing what I failed to tell you. You consented to me. To that night. To every place you put your hands and every place you let me put mine. But I let you choose without the full truth, and that means I made the choice smaller than it should have been."

"That is the first honest thing you've said that sounds like it cost you."

"You're right. I won't tell you it was noble. It was fear."

"I don't forgive you," she says. "Not the cage. Not two days of silence."

"That isn’t what this is."

"I know. That's why I'm still here. Keep going. I want the rest—your brother, the routes, the full story. Don't stop talking until I know everything you do."

So I keep going.

21

AVERY

He finishes near the afternoon. A lot of information in one day leaving an echo through my mind. I set my folder on the cold slab between us and open it to the seal photographs, because evidence is what I can make sense of.

"Terms," I say. "You don't get my help for free, and you don't get it on faith."

"Name them."

"The truth stops being hidden from me even when it's ugly. Especially then. No more deciding which parts I can handle. If you can't tell me, you say that, and why. And you stop with having people follow me. I'm a person who works with you, or not at all. I can walk away now, leave this town and never look back if that can't happen."

"Agreed. Every last part."