Page 12 of Bite Bonded Bride

"Out," she says.

He doesn't move. "I'll stay."

"You'll pace holes in my floor and contaminate my workspace with all that—" she waves a hand vaguely in his direction, "—territorial energy. Out."

The silence stretches. I watch Zareth's eye twitch.

Then — and I will carry this moment for a long time — he leaves.

I gawp at the empty doorway.

"How did you do that?"

Seralya resumes her work, perfectly unbothered. "He respects competence. It's nearly his only soft spot." She pauses, considering. "Well. It was."

I don't ask what she means. I have a feeling I already know.

With him gone, the room breathes differently. "The children in the abandoned district," I say, while Seralya works. "What happened to that part of the city?"

Her hands don't slow. "The corruption took it."

"From the Wildspont."

“From the weapon,” she corrects, voice carefully neutral in the way of someone repeating something that still angers her. She sets down a small jar and looks at me directly. “That’s what the Wildspont is. The dark elf houses opened it deliberately beneath our oldest territories. They knew exactly what it would do.” After a moment, she nods to herself and unfolds a dense hand-drawn map across the worktable, covered in tunnels and markings.

"Come here."

I lean in.

The map shows the underground kingdom in full. And across its eastern and northern quarters, sector after sector has been filled in with dark ink, spreading inward like a wound that refuses to close.

"Each shadow marks a district consumed," she says. "The corruption follows the mountain's magic. When the magic weakens, the corruption fills the gap. The Wildspont keeps it unstable. Keeps us" — she taps the small cluster of unmarked districts at the map's center — "here. Shrinking."

They aren't shadows, I think, staring at all that dark ink. They're echoes. Everything that used to be there, leaving its shape behind as it disappears.

"He's been trying to stop it," I say quietly.

"For decades." Seralya begins rolling the map. "Zareth was seventeen when he first led a defense against the corrupted creatures. He's led every defense since. He's buried more of his people than any ruler should and he has never once—" She stops. Considers. Continues carefully. "He has never let anyone see what that costs him."

The warmth in my chest moves again. I press my hand flat against my sternum as if I could still it.

He returns to the sound of his own name on Seralya's lips, and I watch him hear the end of what she said. I watch him realize I know.

The mask doesn't fall dramatically. It just… goes slack. Tired.

He leans against the doorframe and looks at the map Seralya is still holding, and briefly I see it: the exhaustion beneath the armor. Not the prince or the Hollow Prince. Just a man who has been carrying something enormous for so long he's forgotten what standing upright felt like before it.

"How much did she tell you," he says.

"Enough." I hold his gaze. "Why didn't you⁠—"

"Because knowing wouldn't have changed anything." His voice is low, rough at the edges in some new, unfamiliar way. "And I don't perform suffering for an audience."

Seralya quietly excuses herself. I don't watch her go.

I watch him.

The fear is gone. I keep waiting for it to return, my steady companion since the collapse but it doesn’t. What lives in its place is a quiet, magnetic pull. A warmth hums in my chest faintly, like a plucked string in an empty hall, and it leans toward him the same way I can’t stop myself from doing.