Page 11 of Bite Bonded Bride

“I’m not a—” I stop. Stand. Put two feet of space between us. It helps nothing. Cybele is quiet. The thread pulls, constant and gold and humming, and I feel her pulse like it belongs to me.

Claiming. Every Vrakken instinct I possess has a single, unified, screaming verdict.

Mine. Protect. Do not let her go back to the surface.

I gaze at the dead city around us and understand, with a clarity that feels very much like dread, that I am already lost.

7

CYBELE

The abandoned district doesn't look like a warzone. It looks like a neighborhood that simply… stopped. Cooking pots sit on cold stone hearths. Children's footwear are lined neatly beside doorways carved directly into the cavern wall. Someone hung dried flowers above a threshold, now black-petaled but they're still there, brittle and forgotten, swaying faintly in air that smells of damp stone and aged spaces grieving.

They left in a hurry, I think. Or they didn't leave at all.

I don't say it out loud. Zareth walks ahead of me, silent as ever, his silhouette cutting through the pale blue of the bioluminescent moss that lines the tunnel walls. When we pass the darker sections where the moss has gone gray and patchy, his shoulders tighten. I notice now. I'm starting to notice everything.

"People lived here," I say. I can't stop myself.

"They did."

"Recently?"

"Eighteen months ago." A pause. "The corruption took the eastern wall."

I glance at the footwear again.

The first family we pass huddles inside a partially collapsed alcove that might once have been a home. A Vrakken woman with pale birch-colored skin sits with two children pressed against her sides. They’re too small, ribs visible beneath thin fabric, skin so translucent it looks stretched over bone. They watch us with huge crimson eyes like Zareth’s, but dulled and not by sleep.

My chest twists in a way I wasn't prepared for. These are the monsters, says a voice in my head, the same voice that learned its lessons early, in schoolrooms and mining settlements and every fireside story told to keep human children obedient. The Vrakken are feral. Ancient. Wrong.

The child closest to me can't be older than five, if Vrakken age is anything like humans. She's clutching a carved stone figure to her chest, a little animal, smooth from handling and watching me the way prey watches something it has already accepted will eat it.

Everything they told us was a lie.

The thought arrives fully formed, and it settles like a stone dropping into still water.

I don't say anything. I keep walking. But the guilt sits behind my sternum for the duration of the journey, sharp-edged and stubborn, and I don't try to reason it away.

We find a safe haven in Seralya, a healer and magic scholar and her space smells like cold herbs mixed with a sharp, clean smell that cuts through the underground damp. She's smaller than I expected for a Vrakken, and she greets us with the brisk efficiency of someone perpetually behind on a list of tasks that never shrinks.

"Sit," she says to me, already reaching for supplies. Not unkind. Just precise.

I sit. The wound on my shoulder has been Zareth's crude handiwork since the tunnels, serviceable, and clearly bothering him to look at. He stations himself against the far wall the moment we arrived, arms crossed, those predator's eyes locked on me with an intensity that makes the skin of my neck prickle.

He hasn't stopped watching me since the blood exchange. I've started thinking of it as the way you'd describe weather, constant, ambient, impossible to ignore.

Seralya unwraps my shoulder without ceremony. Her fingers are cool and exact.

"Feeding blood without consent is a significant act," she says mildly, not looking up.

"He had my consent."

"Mm." She doesn't sound convinced. Or maybe she sounds too convinced. Either way, she lets it go, and I feel Zareth's gaze sharpen from across the room. The warmth spreading in my chest is a strange, persistent pull that's lived there since the tunnels, it tilts faintly toward him, like a compass needle finding north.

Stop it, I tell myself. Focus.

Seralya works efficiently, but Zareth doesn't. He paces, stops, stares, and shifts his weight. At one point he moves three steps closer for no apparent reason, and Seralya pauses, turns, and gives him a look so flat and unimpressed that I almost forget my shoulder hurts.