Page 16 of Bite Bonded Bride

Seven hands. Seven.

This is where I die.

The understanding is clean and cold and completely certain. I have no maps here, no ropes, no exit I've already charted in my mind. I stand in the midst of a polished black floor surrounded by a civilization that has decided, rationally and without cruelty, that I need to stop existing.

I do not let my knees buckle. I want to. I don't.

The guards step forward.

"Vel'ashar nek."

Zareth's voice. Two words. Low, quiet, and so absolute the guards stop moving like the sound physically halted them.

The chamber goes dangerously silent.

Zareth steps forward, beside me, his presence like something that has decided to become a wall.

"I invoke the right of sovereign claim. Under the old law." His crimson eyes move across the council without hurry. "She is under my personal protection. Her life is bound to my rule. Touch her and you challenge my throne directly."

The silence cracks into something louder than noise.

Shock. Raw, unanimous, reverberating off the obsidian walls and bouncing back twice as sharp. Three council members are talking over each other. I catch fragments — impossible, archaic, the prince has lost⁠—

"You would invoke the old law," Maevra says carefully, cautiously, "for a human woman you have known for three days."

"I would invoke it for anyone under my protection."

She scrutinizes me then, and it is not hate in her eyes, it’s far more unsettling than that. "You are asking me to watch a human woman undo everything we’ve done for our people."

"No," Zareth says. "I am telling the council that she will not die in this room."

Maevra holds his gaze for a lingering moment. Then she sits back, looks directly at me.

"You are nothing," she says. Quiet. Precise. The kind of statement designed to cut clean. "You are a parasite the prince has dragged into our walls. Whatever he believes he feels for you will kill him faster than any corruption."

Something happens to Zareth beside me.

A low, bone-deep vibration that I initially mistake for the magma channels shifting in the walls. But it's not the walls. It's him. A sound building at the base of his chest, barely audible, absolutely unmistakable. I look up.

His posture changes, shoulders dropping forward slightly, predatory, like weight redistributing before a strike. His fangs are visible. The faint black vein-markings on his throat are glowing. His eyes, when they land on Maevra, are not the eyes of a politician managing a difficult conversation.

"Say that again," he says softly, "and I won’t hesitate in removing your seat from this council personally."

Something shifts in Maevra’s face. Surprise, swift and gone. She doesn’t speak further. Everyone else follows suit. We are dismissed before I fully understand what just happened. The corridor outside the chamber is empty. Zareth walks ahead of me, not speaking. His shoulders are rigid, the tension in them visible even through the dark armor.

What he just did in there…

He didn't argue or negotiate. He took an ancient law and planted it like a stake in the ground directly between me and the thing trying to kill me, and then he dared nine council members to uproot it. Including his mother.

He saved my life.

And in doing so, he put a target on his own back so large and obvious that even the two guards trailing us at a distance are not quite meeting his eyes anymore. The political isolation is already happening. I can feel it in the way they walk, hostile and hesitant. I watch him and I think: you may have just made yourself as expendable as me.

10

ZARETH

My mother never knocks. The door to my private chamber falls open. I barely have time to remove my gauntlets, and Maevra Vhalor steps inside like she owns the stone itself. In a different life, she did. Part of me suspects she still believes she does.