Page 36 of Bite Bonded Bride

Malachar wipes his blade on the hem of his coat without looking down. Then he looks at me.

He approaches the cell with unhurried steps, hands clasped behind his back, and stops just beyond arm's reach, far enough to be safe, close enough to make the distance feel like condescension.

"Cybele." My name in his mouth is almost pleasant. "You look exhausted."

I don't move away from the bars. Every instinct screams at me to, but I don't. "Your hospitality could use work."

Something in his expression shifts to amusement. "The old man was going to kill you. I've saved your life."

"You've saved your investment." I keep my voice flat. "There's a difference."

He tilts his head. "I want to offer you something better than whatever these creatures promised." His gaze moves to Varkai's body with the same mild interest he'd give a piece of misplaced furniture. "A return to the surface. Your brother's debts cleared, all of them. Whatever healers he needs, whatever remedies. A permanent stipend. Safety, Cybele. Real safety, not whatever arrangement you've managed to negotiate with the Hollow Prince."

My stomach turns over.

Edrin.

His name lands in my chest heavily, and I feel the ripple of it, his dark curls, his careful hands sorting herbs, the way he still calls me Sib like he did when we were children and the world was smaller. The exhaustion on his face every time I left for another dangerous job and neither of us acknowledged it might be the last one.

Malachar watches my face. He sees me thinking about it. I watch him notice.

"In exchange for what," I say.

"A report." He says it like it's nothing. "Factual. Well-documented. A cartographer's professional account of the instability beneath Hollow Mountain, attributed to Vrakken corruption of the underground system. Mining disasters, civilian endangerment, evidence of hostile subterranean species." He pauses. "It would justify a very thorough response."

A total extermination.

I look at Varkai's body. At the dead Vrakken guards outside and the ley lines carved into the floor beneath Malachar's polished boots. Ancient architecture built for connection, not destruction, buried under three centuries of manufactured mythology and I think about starving civilians and Zareth's face in the dark when he thought I wasn't looking and Seralya explaining Vrakken history with shaking hands.

"No," I say.

Malachar studies me for a moment. Then he nods once, slowly, like I've confirmed something he already expected.

"Pity," he says, turning away. "Burn the bodies," he tells his soldiers. "And resume the elder's work." His eyes move to me, cold as the light his people carried in. "We'll need the girl prepared."

20

ZARETH

My warriors move in formation behind me, silent as stone, as we press through the last narrow passage connecting the outer ruins to the ritual chamber. Twenty-three of them. The best I have left.

Twenty-three. What that number means now, I do not let myself think about.

The arch opens.

And I see it.

The chamber is immaculate with them inside it. That is the first thing that strikes me, and how clean their armor is. Polished silver-and-gold plate catching the ritual firelight, every fastening precise, every insignia untouched by the ruin surrounding them. They stand inside ancient walls black with centuries of dried Vrakken blood and collapsed magic and they look otherworldly. Scrubbed and manicured and unbothered by what they are doing in it.

They brought torches.

The detail is offensive. I count sixteen soldiers at a glance. Four more near the chamber's far wall where a cell is carved directly into the stone. In the center of the room, my dead Vrakken warriors who fell defending these ruins have been rolled together in a pile. Someone has already begun wrapping them for burning. And beside them, arranged with a kind of deliberate contempt I find almost admirable in its cruelty, is Varkai.

The Deep Speaker. Ancient and hollow-eyed even in death. His obsidian staff has been snapped. Something in my chest pulls apart.

The bond roars.

It doesn't ask. One moment I am calculating angles and the next I am moving, and there is nothing left of the prince in me.