Page 28 of Bite Bonded Bride

"We need to go," I say instead, because I am done pushing my luck with a load-bearing stone tonight.

We part in the corridor outside the library, both of us wearing the hollowness of people marked by knowledge they cannot unlearn.

"Rest," Seralya says. It sounds like an order. "We reconvene tomorrow."

"Tomorrow." I tighten the strap of my satchel, feeling the weight of the scrolls inside. Evidence. The kind of thing that changes wars. "Sleep well, Sera."

She gives me a look that says she doubts either of us will.

When I reach Zareth's chambers, he isn’t there, only the smell of him remains. I breathe it in, sigh. I've stopped pretending it doesn't settle something in my chest. The room is my one safe place in this entire underground kingdom and my body knows it even when my brain is still running tallies.

I sit on the bed’s edge, satchel beside me, and tell myself I'll wait up for him.

I don't mean to think about what happened between us. I genuinely don't. But the bed smells like him too, and my mind — traitor — reels straight back to the heat of his hands and the way he looked at me. My face does something embarrassing. I press my palms over it.

Get it together, Sib.

I lay back. Just for a moment. I think. I’ll just rest for a moment…

I wake up wrong. Everything’s too cold and quiet. My neck prickles.

I sit up. Reach beside me.

My hand finds the satchel. I feel inside without looking, still half-asleep, reaching for the solid weight of the scrolls⁠—

Nothing.

I blink my bleary eyes open.

Check again. Empty.

I sit up abruptly, tear the satchel open, shake it, turn it inside out against the sheets. I drop to the floor and check beneath the bed. I strip the blankets off. Nothing but the empty floor and the empty sheets and the empty bag.

I stumble back from the bed with my heart slamming and my hands empty, with the clarity of a person who has just realized exactly how badly they have been played. The room was guarded. I know the layout of this corridor. I know what it takes to move through Vrakken-controlled space undetected, either you're invisible, or you're known.

And the thing about a locked room is that the only people who can move through it quietly are the ones who made the locks.

What if…

The corrupted tunnel creatures. The collapsing districts. The ritual elders who want to bleed me out onto ancient stone. I've been telling myself the enemy wears dark elf colors, a polished, arrogant look with bronze-skin and violet-eyes. But you don't steal from inside a prince's guarded chambers unless someone with rank opened the door and told the guards to look away.

The beasts aren't just in the tunnels. They're the ones holding the torch. The thought barely finishes forming before a sensation, fine and electric, like static passes through me.

The pressure of being watched, not the way Zareth watches me, but flatter. The way a predator goes still in the dark before it decides whether you're worth the effort. My skin pulls tight across my shoulders.

Behind me, in the carved alcove near the far wall, something breathes. And it is waiting to see what I do next.

My eyes slide to the knife on the nightstand. Three feet. Maybe less. I run the numbers the way I run every unstable tunnel, weight, distance, and probability of survival.

The odds are bad.

I take the chance anyway. I lunge across the room, reach for the knife.

I don't make it.

16

ZARETH