Page 17 of Bite Bonded Bride

"Close it," I say, without turning around.

The door clicks shut. The silence that follows is not comfortable. It never is between us anymore.

"You threatened three council elders. My position." Her voice is quiet. That is how I know she is furious—my mother only raises her voice when she wants an audience. Right now, she wants none. "In front of the full assembly, Zareth. You bared your teeth at Lord Druven like a common⁠—"

"Like a prince protecting his property." I pull the first gauntlet free and set it on the table. The sound rings through the room. "Which is what I am."

"The girl is not your property."

No. She is something far more dangerous than that. I don't say it.

"I placed her under my protection," I say instead. "That is my right."

"Your right?" Maevra moves into my periphery, and I finally turn to face her. The ritual scars along her throat catch the bioluminescent light. "You have jeopardized three hundred years of careful political balance for a human cartographer who stumbled into our kingdom by accident."

"Our kingdom is collapsing."

"And you believe a surface woman will stop that?"

I don't know what I believe. That is the honest answer, and I will not give it to her.

"I believe the council spending breath on her execution is time we don't have." I move to the narrow stone window that overlooks the lower cavern district. From here, the capital should be lit by a hundred channeled light wells, the old Vrakken engineering that drew heat and luminescence from the mountain itself. Tonight, two of the seven wells are completely dark. The third is flickering so badly it looks like it's dying mid-breath. "Look at the city, Mother. Look at it."

She looks, says nothing.

"The lower wards have been cold for six days," I continue. "Three families were evacuated from the western corridor this morning after the ceiling dropped four inches overnight. We are bleeding out from the inside, and the council wants to hold votes about one human woman." I turn back to face her. "So yes. I ended that conversation."

Maevra's expression does not change. She is marble and old blood, every soft thing carved out of her by decades of loss she will never name. I know she loves me. It lives somewhere beneath all that stone, and sometimes I catch a glimpse of it.

"You forget," she says carefully, "that the council watches for weakness. What you showed them today was not strength, Zareth. It was hunger. And there is nothing more dangerous to a ruler than letting his enemies smell what he wants."

The word lands somewhere uncomfortable.

Hunger.

Even now, standing in a room on the other side of the capital, I can feel the faint pull of it—a tug low in my chest, like a thread drawn taut. Her scent, warm and alive and absurdly human, ghosts across my senses for just a moment before I shut it down. She is in the eastern corridor. Resting, I think. Safe.

I think about her too often.

"Noted," I say.

"Zareth—"

"I said noted, Mother."

Her eyes stay on me for several long seconds, searching for something I won't show her. Then she turns and leaves without another word. Varkai arrives an hour later, bringing the smell of deep stone with him, very cold and metallic. He moves slowly, leaning on his obsidian staff, white eyes catching the weak light as they sweep the chamber. Old instincts make me track him like a threat even though I summoned him myself. I have never trusted Varkai. I have also never been able to afford not to use him.

"Walk with me," I say.

We descend to the foundation level of the capital, where the ancient channeling stones were laid by the first Vrakken who built beneath this mountain. I want him to see it without preparation. I want to watch his face. He sees it.

The channeling stones which should hum with a low, constant resonance, a vibration you feel in your back teeth more than hear are silent. Two of them are cracked like they burned out from the inside. The air is wrong. There is a draft that should not exist, cold and carrying that particular smell of rot and ozone.

"Wildspont," Varkai says softly, almost to himself. "She breathes faster now."

"How long?"

He is quiet. He runs one gnarled hand along a cracked channeling stone, and I watch the disgust move across his face before he controls it.