Page 41 of Bite Bonded Bride

"You're using the fact that I can't think clearly around you," he says. His voice is raw-edged.

"I'm using the fact that you can think clearly. You always could. You were just afraid of what thinking clearly would require."

His hands move to my waist. Settle there, steady and warm against my bare skin.

"Both worlds?" he says.

"Both worlds."

22

ZARETH

The capital is screaming. Not metaphorically. Not the low sound of a people in mourning, which I have learned to carry. This is raw and animal, bouncing off stone never built to hold it. We hear it before we see it. Before we cross into the main district, it hits us like a wall. The wet crack of bone meeting rock. And underneath all of it, the weeping. That is what undoes me. Not the fighting. The weeping.

I step out of the passage with Cybele at my back and stop. The capital, my capital, the city my mother kept breathing by sheer force of will and my people sustained on blood and endurance and grief is eating itself alive.

Loyalists and traditionalists tear through the main thoroughfare in a grinding, vicious knot, my people in the black sash I ordered distributed, the traditionalists in the crimson of the old council seal. They fight the way Vrakken fights when they have lost all reason: without restraint, without mercy, centuries of suppressed desperation finally finding a direction. Collapsing archways rain debris over combatants and civilians alike. A child is carried through the crush by a woman whose face is bloodied past recognition. Two soldiers I trained personally are locked together ten feet away, neither willing to yield.

The constant bond in my chest that connects me to Cybele is a discordant hum. Arrhythmic. Wrong. It only straightens when I feel the heat of her at my left shoulder.

She is behind me and whole. The hum steadies.

Barely.

This is what I built, I think, surveying it. No. This is what I inherited. There is a difference. There has to be.

I am still working out whether I believe that when movement to my right makes every predatory instinct I own snap to attention.

Two figures. Coming fast. I move without thinking, my body dropping into a fighting stance, putting myself squarely between Cybele and whoever is approaching. My hand finds the hilt of my blade. My vision narrows.

Then I see who it is, and the blade stays sheathed.

Veyrik and my mother.

Veyrik looks like he has been through a cave collapse and walked out the other side on spite alone. His armor is split across the left pauldron. There is blood on his jaw that is not entirely his own. He meets my eyes across the distance between us, and the look on his face does is what I am not prepared for.

He kneels.

Veyrik Sorn — The Fang of Hollow Mountain, the man who has fought beside me since we were both young enough to be afraid of things kneels on the ruined floor of the capital and presses one fist to the stone. For a prolonged moment, neither of us speaks.

"Get up," I say, finally.

He does. Like the motion costs him something.

"I watched them do it." His voice is stripped of ceremony. "The elders. Three families from the lower seventh district, they were already starving, Zareth. Already barely standing. And the traditionalist council told them it was necessary. Told them their blood would stabilize the mountain." He stops. "They believed it. They walked into the ritual chamber because they were told it would save their children."

The silence between us is absolute despite the chaos around us.

"It didn't work," I say.

"No." His red eyes are steady, but barely. "It didn't work. And the children are still starving. And I stood there, and I let myself believe the old ways were worth more than—" He stops again. "I was wrong."

I glance at him for a period of time. The hum in my chest shifts, less fractured now.

"Then stand beside me," I say. "And don't kneel again."

My mother speaks before I can turn to address her. She is looking at Cybele.