Page 33 of Bite Bonded Bride

I breathe through as a scent hits me.

Old. Dry. The smell of deep stone and ancient ritual smoke with parchment and a cold undertone, Varkai. I know that scent. I have known it since childhood.

My claws split the door frame without my permission.

The room tells the rest of the story. Her chalk satchel is overturned near the foot of the sleeping platform, its contents scattered across stone. One of her maps is torn at the corner and pressed half beneath the leg of the table, as if dragged there by a struggling foot. Small details. Evidence of resistance.

Of course she didn't go quietly.

I stand in the ruin of a room that was beginning to feel like a home other than a chamber, and I understand with a calm more terrifying than rage that Varkai has finally decided to act.

I am already moving before the calm breaks.

The capital is not the same as an hour ago. It takes me three corridors to understand what I am hearing, as I descend toward the civic quarter, voices. Hundreds of them. The sound of people finally splitting open beneath the weight of everything at once.

Two factions face each other across the main thoroughfare, torches guttering in the thick, warm air. The bioluminescent panels in this section have gone dark and the firelight paints everything in shades of orange. I can smell the fear beneath the shouting, sharp and acrid, the fear that comes from a betrayal of a neighbor whose face you know.

I scan for Veyrik. I find him posted at the eastern arch's edge, arms crossed, watching the crowd with the expression of a man who'd made a decision and not yet reconciled himself to it.

"Veyrik."

He turns. A flicker passes his scarred face, relief, immediately buried. "Prince."

"She's been taken." No preamble. There isn't time. "I need your unit."

The silence thereafter is its own answer, but he gives me words anyway, because Veyrik has always believed in saying things plainly.

"I know."

The two words land like stone.

"You know."

"The council authorized it three hours ago." His face is set. His red eyes don't flinch from mine. "I was informed as a courtesy."

A shivering cold moves through me in waves "And you said nothing."

"I said everything I had to say." His voice drops, and beneath the hardness, I feel his remorse and grief. "I told you weeks ago, Zareth. I told you what this would cost. You looked at that woman and stopped hearing me."

"She is not the problem⁠—"

"She is the only problem." He steps closer. "The council is not completely wrong, and so is Varkai. We are dying. And you—" He stops. Swallows. "You are standing here asking me to help you choose her over them."

I look at him. This man who has bled beside me in a hundred tunnels. Who carried my body out of the lower ruins after the collapse of year forty. Who wept, silently and only once, when his children were buried.

"I am asking you," I say quietly, "to trust me."

"I trust you." He does not hesitate. "I don't trust what she's made of you."

What he said is true and complicated, hurts in a way the bond alone cannot explain.

"Then stand aside."

He does. And I keep walking, because if I stop I will say something neither of us can take back.

My mother is in her private hall, standing at the stone basin where she has always gone to think. The water is still. She does not turn when I enter.

"He took her," I say.