Page 53 of Bite Bonded Bride

My hand closes around his throat. Claws pressed against the pulse point. His blood is right there, the source of everything, every starved child, every abandoned tunnel, every Vrakken who died believing the world had simply forgotten them⁠—

The Blood Hunger is a wall of sound in my skull. Tear it out. End it. Make him pay down to the last drop.

Malachar's eyes are widely darting about.

And the mechanism screams again.

I look at it. The white light is fracturing the stone housing in jagged lines. The Wildspont pulses beneath the chamber floor like another heartbeat, wrong and accelerating and hungry. If it destabilizes fully⁠—

Everyone dies.

She dies.

I breathe through it.

I open my hand.

Malachar drops. I'm already turning, pressing both palms flat against the mechanism's fractured surface, letting shadow-magic pour out of me in a controlled flood, not a weapon but a binding, shadow threaded with blood, filling the cracks the way mortar fills stone. It costs. I feel it immediately, something deep in my chest pulling tight and then tighter, my vision graying at the edges.

Hold.

The white light slows. Dims. The mechanism shudders once more and steadies.

Behind me, I hear scrambling. Running footsteps. Malachar, moving for the exit while my back is turned.

I don't stop him. The mountain does.

He makes it three steps toward the exit before the first block takes him at the shoulder, and he screams. A ragged surprised cry, he really thought he’d make it. The stone crushes him completely, a wet and final crunch of bone and flesh buried, nothing like the composed, poisonous man who stood in violet light twenty minutes ago and called compassion a weakness.

Then a ringing silence as the dust settles over the rubble like a shroud, burying Lord Malachar Thul, magistrate of Hollow Mountain, architect of a genocide, where he stood.

My eyes fix on the mechanism, hands still pressed against cracked obsidian, lungs burning, the Wildspont violet and dim, almost quiet around me.

Cybele's hand finds my back.

She is alive. He is not.

For now, that is enough.

29

CYBELE

The mechanism won’t move. I’ve tried every sequence Seralya and I mapped in the collapsing library, every theory we scratched into crumbling parchment while the mountain groaned around us. The Heart Chamber pulses like a wounded animal screaming its last breath, while the Wildspont in the far wall has been shrieking at a loud frequency for the past ten minutes.

Zareth stands six feet away, watching me, blood-red eyes burning, hunger naked and absolute. The bond roars through me. Neither of us moves.

The look that passes between us is an answer to something neither of us has the breath left to ask. If we die tonight. His eyes say it. Let it be like this. Mine say it back.

I don't know who moves first.

We meet in the middle, his mouth coming down on mine like a door slamming shut on everything that came before. Clothes fall away in pieces, and I barely track which hands belong to whom because the bond is flooding every point of contact and my thoughts are dissolving at the edges.

His hands drop to my breasts and the sound I make is not dignified. He palms them, thumbs dragging slow and deliberate across my nipples, and when I gasp into his mouth he does it again, harder.

I feel him against my stomach. Hard and thick and already leaking through the fabric between us, the length of him an insistent presence that the bond responds to with a fresh wave of heat that floods straight between my thighs.

He hoists me up like I weigh nothing, lowering us both down onto the pile of his discarded outer armor and my shed jacket, crumpled stone-cold cloth that barely qualifies as a cushion but neither of us cares. He settles over me, between my thighs, his cock hot-heavy against my belly in an unconscious roll that drags it against my skin and makes me arch.