Page 10 of Bite Bonded Bride

"It's just⁠—"

"It's corruption." The words come out flat, factual, because if I let anything else into my voice right now I will not be able to control what follows it. "Your blood cannot fight it. You will be dead inside the hour if it spreads."

She stares at me. The amber of her eyes is still sharp, still fighting, even as the color drains from her face.

"What do you suggest, Prince."

What I suggest has not been done willingly in my lifetime. I press my wrist to my mouth, dig my canines in, and open the vein. Her eyes drop to the blood welling at my wrist, then come back to my face. There is a long beat of silence that feels like standing at the edge of something with no visible bottom.

"That seems unhygienic⁠—"

"Drink." I growl.

She drinks.

The bond doesn't ask my permission. It doesn't introduce itself slowly or politely. It arrives all at once, crashing through every wall I've maintained for over a century and suddenly I feel her. In my marrow. The thrumming of it starts in my chest and radiates outward like heat from a forge, a golden thread, raw and humming, pulling taut between my sternum and hers.

I feel her pain first. The deep, searing drag of the wound. The cold creeping in at the edges of it. Then her heartbeat. Faint. Stuttering. And as my blood reaches it, slowly, stubbornly but stronger.

And beneath all of that: her will. Pure and almost offensive in its ferocity. She is not ready to die. She is furious at the suggestion of it. She is thinking about her brother, about the tunnels above, about maps she hasn't finished drawing, this woman is cataloguing reasons to survive while bleeding out on the floor of a dead civilization, and the intimacy of knowing that, of feeling it⁠—

It terrifies me.

It also sends a current through me that I have no name for and no desire to examine. When she stills, I pull my wrist back. The wound on her shoulder has already begun to close, the corruption retreating from her skin in faint, receding tendrils. Her breathing evens out. She slumps sideways and I catch her before the thought is fully formed.

I lay her down against the least-destroyed section of wall and do not move away. I should move away. I don't.

The thread between us is constant now, at low-level, unignorable, like a second heartbeat living in a frequency just beneath my own. I am aware of her in every way. Her scent has changed. It was human before, now warm and foreign and vaguely irritating in its fragility. Now it is something else entirely. Rich. Threaded through with something that smells distinctly, undeniably like mine.

I sit three inches away and hate myself for not moving further. She wakes an hour later.

"You should have left me in the corner," I say, before she can speak.

Cybele blinks at the ceiling. "Good morning to you too."

"You had no weapon. You had no training advantage. What you did was⁠—"

"Save your life?" She pushes herself upright slowly, and I track every micro-expression of pain that crosses her face without meaning to. "You're welcome, by the way."

"It was reckless."

"It worked."

"You are human," I say, and I hear how it sounds, not a slur or dismissal but closer to desperation dressed in contempt. "Your body does not recover the way mine does. The risk you took⁠—"

She stops. Tilts her head. Studies me the way she studies tunnel walls, searching for structure and meaning in the cracks.

"You're worried," she says slowly. "You're actually— worried."

I say nothing.

She looks at the distance between us. At the fact that I have not stood up. At the way my eyes have not left her face since she opened hers.

"Zareth. Can I call you Zareth?" She barrels on without waiting for my reply. “Why’re you hovering?” Her voice has dropped into something quieter.

"I am not⁠—"

"You are. Like some distressed knight standing guard over a fair maiden."