Page 38 of Bite Bonded Bride

"Nothing serious." A pause. "You're bleeding."

"I noticed."

A silence stretches for a breath. Then she reaches out and touches my face — careful, deliberate, her fingers warm against skin that is always too cold and the bond in my chest drops to a low, steady hum. The screaming for hours finally allowed to exhale.

"The records," she says quietly.

She moves before I can answer, already stepping past me into the chamber, and I watch her navigate the wreckage sharply and purposefully. Her hands find the scattered research materials, prehistoric records, Seralya's maps, stolen documentation and she gathers them against her chest like someone reclaiming a sacrality. Her chin is set. Her eyes are dry.

She is furious, I realize. She has been furious this entire time.

That, too, feels more real than anything else in this room. I make myself look at the rest of it. Twenty-three warriors came in behind me.

I count what remains. I count again, because some part of me is still convinced the number will change if I look longer. It doesn't.

The silence in the chamber after battle is its own specific weight. No groaning. No movement from my side of the room. Only the drip from a crack in the ceiling, and the distant shriek of the Wildspont two levels below us, and the sound of Cybele's breathing.

She comes back to my side without being asked. Stands close and I can feel the warmth of her, a small persistent heat against the cold that lives in my bones.

"Zareth."

I don't answer.

"Look at me."

I do.

Her eyes are steady. She has seen what I am, tonight, not the prince nor the performance of control I maintain for courts and councils and she is still standing here. Looking up at me with the ancient records pressed to her chest and her hair half-destroyed and blood that is not hers on her sleeve.

The ruins tremble around us. Another spiderweb of cracks races along the wall above the arch.

I reach for her. My hands are still shaking, blood hunger, the crash after feeding fury, old and ungentle and I pull her against my chest with more force than I meant to and she doesn't fight it.

"I knew," I say. The words come out stripped of everything. No armor left. "When I came through that arch, I knew what it would cost."

She is very still against me.

"And if the answer had been different." My arms tighten. "If it had cost me everything above and below this mountain⁠—"

I stop. The sentence doesn't need finishing.

She doesn't tell me I'm wrong.

21

CYBELE

Zareth finds us a safe place the way he finds everything: instinctively, without explanation, moving through the underground dark like it belongs to him.

I drop the satchel of ancient records against the far wall and finally let myself feel how badly everything hurts.

"You're bleeding through your armor. Sit." I say.

He obeys.

I work the buckles of his chest plate loose and try not to react when I see the damage underneath. Three deep gashes across his ribs, already knitting at the edges. I press a cloth to the worst of it and clean the dried blood away in slow, deliberate strokes. He doesn't flinch. He just watches me with those luminous crimson eyes and that absolute predatory stillness.

We might not survive the morning. The thought surfaces again, quiet and certain. Dark elves above. Half the Vrakken council below. Nowhere left to run.