Page 49 of Bite Bonded Bride

"My lord." He drops to a knee. "They weren't targeting soldiers. They hit the medical sector. The humans." He swallows. "The boy, Cybele's brother. He's gone. They took him."

The world narrows to a single point.

Edrin.

The bond detonates.

I sense Cybele's terror like a blade pulled hot from a forge, slamming into my chest through the link between us, raw and wordless and absolute. My shadows snap outward in a six-foot radius. The temperature around me drops sharply enough that the soldier to my front sees his own breath and flinches backward. I do not notice. I am moving away already, calculating Malachar's direction of retreat, the fastest tunnels, the distance between here and whatever hole he has dragged Edrin into⁠—

"Zareth."

Her voice.

She is in front of me before I clear the perimeter, stepping directly into my path with both hands raised. She is shaking. I feel it in the bond even before I see it, her fear a white-hot wire running parallel to my own fury. Her eyes are glassy, her jaw set in that particular way that means she is one breath away from coming apart and has decided not to.

"Move," I say. The word comes out wrong. Too controlled. The kind that precedes catastrophe.

"No." She plants herself. "Zareth, look at me."

"He has your brother."

"I know he has my brother." Her voice cracks on the last word. She seals the crack shut immediately. "I felt it too. I know. But you need to stop and think before you run into those tunnels and get us both killed."

"I am not going to get us killed. I am going to get him back."

"And the mountain?" She steps closer. Her hand finds my forearm, the touch registers through every nerve I possess, and the shadows slow. Just slightly. "What happens to Edrin when the Wildspont finishes destabilizing and brings the whole system down on top of him? What happens to the three thousand Vrakken in those evacuation corridors? What happens to everyone if we leave right now and the mountain collapses before we reach the chamber?"

I do not answer.

Her grip on my arm tightens. "Zareth. If we go after him now, he will die. The only way he walks out of this mountain is if we stabilize the Wildspont first. You know that." Her amber eyes hold mine. She is terrified but also absolutely right, and she hates herself for it, and she is saying it anyway. "I need you to know that I know what I'm asking. He's the only family I have left in this world."

She is asking me to hold still while her brother is in the hands of a man I should have killed months ago.

The bond pulses between us, her fear and mine, feeding one another, a loop with no clean exit. I feel the Blood Hunger cresting at the edges of my control. The urge to burn every tunnel between here and Malachar's position, to tear through stone with my bare hands until I find the man and remove him from the world piece by piece.

I breathe and breathe again.

"How long," I say, "to reach the Wildspont chamber."

Her face shifts to relief and anger, tangled together. "Seralya thinks four hours if the eastern corridor is still stable."

"Then we move in ten minutes." I hold her gaze. "We stabilize the mountain. We close the Wildspont. And then—" The word that follows is not a threat. It is a promise made to no one but myself, sealed somewhere beneath bone and blood. "And then I find him."

Whatever life Malachar has left, I will fill every hour of it with the kind of suffering that makes a man beg for the end.

Cybele reads it in my face. She does not argue. She does not tell me to be measured, or proportionate, or careful. She simply nods once, turns to go, and I follow her into the dark.

27

CYBELE

The mountain is screaming, a raw vibration threading up through the soles of my footwear and into my back teeth. The Wildspont's magic bleeds through the walls in long violet streaks that pulse like something with a heartbeat, and every few minutes the floor shudders beneath us hard enough to knock dust from the ceiling in curtains.

I've mapped unstable terrain my whole career. I know what a dying mountain feels like. This feels like a wound that knows it's infected.

"Thirty seconds," Zareth says behind me, his hand landing briefly on my shoulder blade just to remind me he's there. "The next tremor will open that crack wider."

He means the split running diagonal across the passage ahead of us, violet light weeping from the seam like ichor. I study it the way I was taught. ‘Pressure fracture. The magic is new stress on old lines.’