Page 58 of Bite Bonded Bride

He's going to be all right. The knowledge lands in my chest with the force of something I didn't know I was still holding. A breath I've been keeping shallow for years suddenly fills my lungs all the way.

"You're staring," Edrin says, without looking at me.

"You're holding a bowl of Vrakken blood compound like you've done it before."

"Third time today, actually." He does look at me now, and his grin is so familiar it nearly undoes me. "Sera says I have good instincts."

Sera. I glance at Seralya, who is very carefully not reacting to that.

"I'm sure she does," I say.

I slip out before he can react to my jab, stand in the corridor just outside the ward and let the noise of it wash over me. The hammers, the voices, two languages braided together in the low ceiling stone.

I can’t help but think about the sound of rain on the roof of our shack. The way the leak above Edrin's cot used to drip into the bucket we kept there, and how I learned to sleep through it, and then learned to listen for it because the rhythm meant we were still home.

I think about the gray morning light through a window with no glass. The mud on my boots from walking the upper market path. Ordinary, unglamorous things. The texture of a life I can describe in full.

The threat is gone. Malachar is dead. The Wildspont is sealed. Edrin is fine. By every measure I used to track survival by, I have won.

And the world I learned to survive in is gone. Finished. I am not a cartographer who found something dangerous underground and made it back. I am something the old maps don't have a name for yet. A bridge. Whatever that means.

I don't know how to mourn it without feeling ungrateful.

Then warmth. Not from the air. From the inside. A low resonance in my chest. I know exactly who it is before I hear the footsteps.

Zareth moves into the corridor and stops beside me. He's not in armor. Simple dark clothing. He studies my face with that unhurried crimson gaze and doesn't ask what's wrong. He already knows. The bond doesn't require a question.

He steps into me instead of speaking. His arms close around me, firm, completely unmovable. I let my forehead drop against his chest, and I stop pretending I'm fine.

Afterwards, we walk through the eastern clearing district hand in hand, because that is something we do now, apparently. I still notice it. I think I always will.

"The Mordane crew confirmed the northern passage can support cart traffic within a month," I say. "If we run a shared trade route through the junction, the upper settlements get access to Vrakken mineral deposits. Your people get surface grain and medicines."

"And resentment from every dark elf house within fifty miles."

"Resentment they'll have to express openly, now that Malachar's records are public." I glance up at him. "They don't have the cover anymore."

He considers that. His thumb moves across my knuckles once, slowly, the way he does when he's calculating something. "Shared governance of the junction will require a standing council. Human and Vrakken representatives."

"I know. I've been drafting the structure." I tap the map roll tucked under my arm. "It's rough."

"I want to see it."

"It's very rough."

"Cybele."

"Tonight," I say, and he accepts that.

We walk a little further. Workers clear rubble to our left, the rhythmic scrape of stone on stone steady and almost musical. New walls are going up at the end of the corridor, pale fresh-cut rock beside the old dark mineral face of the mountain.

"I can't seem to just be here," I say, finally. "I can't make myself stop looking at the ceiling and missing the sky." I pause. "I don't know if that ever stops. Or if I'm allowed to want it to."

Zareth halts. So I halt.

He turns to face me and takes both my hands in his. His grip is cold and certain and completely, terrifyingly safe.

"You were given a rope and a bad map and told to be useful until you weren't." His voice is even. Precise. "You were a tool they hired and a problem they planned to erase. That is the life you are mourning." His eyes hold mine. "I am not asking you to stop missing the sky. I am asking you to let it be yours — not a view you earn by being indispensable."