Page 26 of Bite Bonded Bride

Four. Five.

"That," I say, "is the single most ignorant proposal this council has produced in three hundred years. And this council once voted to abandon the eastern warrens with civilians still inside them."

The temperature in the room drops.

"A sacrificial tithe is a bandage," I continue, because I'm already in it, I might as well finish it. "A bandage pressed to a wound that has gone gangrenous. You are not buying time. You are purchasing a slightly more comfortable death and calling it a strategy."

"The old rites—" one of the elders begins.

"The old rites were written when we still understood what was beneath us," I say. "We don't anymore. Not fully." I push forward before they can cut me off. "Cybele and I found evidence in the lower ruins. Evidence that this corruption was not naturally occurring. That the Wildspont was deliberately triggered⁠—"

"Enough."

My mother's voice. Quiet. Immovable as the columns.

She looks at me across the length of the table, and for a second she is not the queen. She is the woman who once told me that love was a luxury the last prince of a dying race could not afford.

"Zareth." Just my name. Just the verdict of it. "The survival of thousands cannot be held hostage to the theory of one human woman and the instincts of a son who has not slept in days."

There it is.

Not cruelty. Not malice. Something harder than both. Certainty.

The elders do not argue with her. They don't need to. She has done the work for them. I watch myself in their eyes—the prince, emotional, compromised, attached and I recognize with perfect clarity that nothing I say in this room tonight will land. I am not speaking to a council anymore. I am speaking to a wall that has decided it is a door.

I stand.

No one stops me. I don't expect them to.

The corridor outside is dark and cold and blessedly empty. My footsteps echo against the polished floor, every step a small, sharp sound in the silence and then I just stop.

At the corridor's heart, at the kingdom's core, at the center of everything I have given my entire existence to protecting.

The Blood Bond moves beneath my skin like something alive. Not quite painful but the opposite, an insistent warmth that I am increasingly unable to rationalize away, pulling in a direction wholly removed from council chambers or ancient rites or the survival of my race.

She is somewhere in this kingdom right now. Probably studying something and ignoring every reasonable instinct in that stubborn human body of hers in favor of whatever she decided was worth understanding tonight.

My eyes fall shut.

What if I just took her and left?

The thought arrives with terrifying quietness. No fanfare. No drama. Just a simple, devastating clarity.

I could. That is the part that makes it dangerous, not the wanting, but the knowing that I could. Take her, take the records, take nothing else. Let the council convene without a prince. Let Varkai read his omens to empty chairs. Let the elders sacrifice whatever they choose to sacrifice with no human woman to offer and no son present to object.

The Vrakken have survived this long. They are remarkably difficult to kill.

Cybele, offered up on a ritual altar in a chamber I cannot reach in time, is considerably less so.

The bond pulls again, more steadier, like a tide acknowledging itself. And for one quiet, catastrophic moment, the survival of my entire civilization sits in my chest like a weight I could simply put down.

I don't move.

But I do not stop thinking about it.

15

CYBELE