Page 20 of Bite Bonded Bride

I gasp. Zareth.

He fills the tunnel completely. Pale skin, eyes of the deepest red, and the kind of fury that has gone very, very quiet.

"You followed me," I say.

"Turn around." His voice is controlled. That is somehow more frightening than shouting.

"No."

Annoyance shifts behind his eyes. "Cybele⁠—"

"I found a bypass to the Wildspont chamber that no one knows about and evidence that the entire corruption was engineered." My voice echoes off the stone. "So no. I'm not turning around."

"You walked alone into an unstable magical rupture zone with a torch."

"I also brought chalk and three spare wicks, so I'd call it prepared."

"Stop—"

"You keep doing this." The anger comes up fast and hot and I let it. "You call it protection and it looks exactly like a cage from where I'm standing, Zareth."

His neck tightens, and the vein-markings along his jaw pulse faintly, dark against pale grey skin.

"You have no idea what this place does to⁠—"

"Then tell me. Instead of grabbing my arm in the dark and ordering me backward."

He is very close. I didn't notice when that happened, when the tunnel shrank or when he stepped forward or when I stopped stepping back. The torch between us throws light up the sharp lines of his face and the air still hums and smells of ozone and wrong things.

His eyes drop briefly, involuntarily to my mouth. My pulse does something I'm going to choose not to examine.

"You are—" he starts.

"Frustrating?" It comes more breathless than I meant.

"Driving me crazy." Zareth finishes. Low. Like he didn't fully intend to say them out loud and has decided, now that they're out, not to take them back.

I am aware of every point of contact between us, his hand still curled around my arm, the heat of him in a space too narrow for distance, the way my back is against stone that hums with corrupted magic and somehow that is not the thing making my skin feel electric.

The torch gutters. Our shadows move with it. The deep-buried Wildspont pulses like a heartbeat beneath my feet, and I feel it, the thing Seralya called a bond, the thing Zareth has never once named out loud pulling taut between my ribs like a wire being wound too tight.

I've been telling myself it's proximity. Adrenaline. The particular insanity of near-death experiences shared in cramped underground spaces with a man built like a warning. But all along, I've just been lying to myself.

12

ZARETH

The argument still crackles between us when something shifts in Cybele. Her amber eyes drop to my mouth and, through the tether, want hits me hard and unguarded before she can hide it.

She knows. She feels it too and she's done pretending she doesn't.

I take a step toward her and don’t make it.

Three corrupted creatures burst through the collapsed wall to my left, leaking black ichor and moving in jerking, broken angles. The passage is barely four feet wide. No room for anything except violence done fast.

The obsidian spear is in my hand before the first clears the rubble. I drive it through its skull, rip it free, pivot into the second before it understands the first is dead.

The third lunges for Cybele. She hurls a rock into its face and it staggers. I drop the spear, catch the creature by the throat from behind, and slam it into the wall hard enough to split the skin over my elbow. I barely feel it. I hold on until it stops moving.