Page 30 of Bite Bonded Bride

The scout hits the corridor at a run, skidding on the stone, breathing like she has been chased for blocks.

"Commander." She doesn't look at me first. Veyrik's rank by reflex. Then she catches herself and drops her gaze to the floor between us. "My prince. Lower District Seven. The wall at the eastern passage gave. Creatures—at least a dozen. Civilians—" She stops. Steadies herself. "Dozens dead. The guard post is gone."

The words hit the space between us and stay there.

Dozens dead.

I know what Veyrik's face looks like without turning to see it. The silence he lets build is its own language.

This is the cost.

From somewhere far below us, through stone and cavern and the labyrinth of collapsed passages that used to be our kingdom's eastern wing, I hear screams. The sound travels through the walls, changed and distorted, arriving as something between a cry and an echo of one.

My people.

My people.

"Get Commander Drasev. Pull the second unit from the northern sector and redirect—" My voice works. My mind works. The tactical calculation assembles itself the way it always does, automatic and cold, because that is what I was trained for. It is what I have always been.

And then the tether pulls.

It starts beneath my sternum. Not as clean as pain. A weight. A pressure that has no origin inside my own body because it doesn't come from my body. It comes from two corridors away and a level above me, from the chambers where I left her sleeping. A heartbeat that isn't mine, steadily slow and present, a second pulse running just behind my own.

She is awake.

I know it the way I know my own name.

"—confirm with Maevra before engaging, the numbers—" Veyrik is still talking. The scout is nodding. The machinery of my command continues without me, which is not an accident, which means Veyrik can handle what comes next.

My legs are already guiding me away.

Not toward the lower district. Not toward the screaming.

Away from it.

The shame is immediate but it doesn't stop me. That is the part I cannot justify. I feel it, the wrongness of turning my back on District Seven, on soldiers who need their prince at the breach and I keep walking. The tether in my chest pulls tighter with every step I take toward her, easing the pressure slightly. Rewarding direction like she is north and I am what has forgotten how to be still.

This is what it has done to you.

The bioluminescent stone lining the Citadel's main corridor pulses its sick gray light around me as I walk. Two months ago this passage blazed blue-white. It was the heart of the mountain, the oldest vein of magic in the whole kingdom, and now it dims and flickers.

I pass three civilians huddled near a cracked support pillar. A family, from the look of them, two adults, a child pressed between them, all three watching the corridor with the wide-flat eyes of people who have stopped expecting good news. They look up when they hear my boots.

They see me.

I watch what moves across their faces. Recognition. Deference. And beneath it, small and terrible—doubt.

Something shifts in my chest.

I look at my people and feel, for the first time in my life, that I am on the wrong side of something I cannot name. The distance between who I have always been and whatever I am becoming in the space between her heartbeat and mine.

The ultimatum has not been delivered yet.

But I understand, walking these gray-lit corridors toward her instead of toward the screaming, It is already here.

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CYBELE