Page 42 of Bite Bonded Bride

Maevra, who has outlived wars and famines and the slow death of everything she built, standing in the ruins of her kingdom and looking at one human woman with the precision of a general reassessing a battlefield. Cybele does not flinch. She holds my mother's gaze with a stubborn steadiness that made me stop treating her as fragile three days into knowing her.

"I called you a weakness," Maevra says. Her voice carries the evenness of someone delivering a military assessment, not an apology. There is no softness nor condescension in it. "I believed your presence would erode everything my son needed to hold these people together. I built that belief from a logic that no longer holds." A pause. "I was wrong in my assessment. I am correcting it."

Cybele says nothing.

Maevra turns to me. She looks like someone who has finished carrying a heaviness, and has only just set it down.

"I heard what you said to the capital," she says. "After they took Cybele."

I wait.

She does not say she is proud. She does not say anything else at all.

But her eyes, those assertive, careful, crimson eyes say it for her. Clearly enough that it lands somewhere beneath my ribs and stays there.

Good, I think, despite everything. Good.

There is no time for more than that. The capital does not stop bleeding just because we have reached an accord.

Veyrik falls in beside me, and within minutes we have a line, loyalist soldiers assembling with the grim, economical speed of citizens, waiting for someone to point them at a problem. I point them at the evacuation routes. The main passage to the upper districts is three minutes from collapse. We move.

What follows is not heroic. It is brutal and loud and relentless, and I am exactly in my element as I stop thinking and work.

Traditionalist fighters who have blocked the civilian corridor get removed. I do not engage them longer than necessary, one decisive motion, then the next threat. Veyrik takes the right flank without being asked. We have fought together long enough that the coordination is wordless, instinctive. Families stream past us through the gap we hold open. Children. Elders. Injured soldiers dragging their wounded. I count faces without meaning to. Not nearly enough survived.

The guilt is a stone I carry in the center of my chest, alongside the bond. I add it to the pile and I keep moving.

The scout reaches us forty minutes into the evacuation. Young. Bloodied from a gash above his brow. He does not waste my time.

"Lord Malachar is moving surface forces into position above the mountain, my prince. Dark elf soldiers. Human mercenaries." He pauses to breathe. "They are sealing the exits."

Veyrik goes very still beside me.

"Sealing," I repeat. Because I need to hear it again to believe what it means.

"Every passage. Every vent. Every route to the surface." The scout meets my eyes. "Any Vrakken who reaches the surface is to be killed on sight and reported as a hostile creature emerging from the tunnels. He is preparing a story, my prince. He intends to bury the mountain and everyone in it and report to the high houses that the corruption has finally consumed everything."

No survivors. No evidence. No record that we ever existed.

I feel Cybele shift beside me before she speaks. I know what she is going to say before the words form. The bond tells me, that thread pulling taut with the particular tension of a decision being made.

"Then I go up," she says. Simply. Like she is proposing a route correction on a survey map. "I'm the only one they won't kill on sight. I have the records. I know the people. If I get to the surface settlements before Malachar's story does⁠—"

"No."

The word comes out of me with a force that surprises even me. Not calculated. Just — no. Every possessive, irrational, ancient instinct I have ever suppressed hitting a single point of absolute refusal.

She glances at me.

"Zareth—"

"I said no." I turn to face her fully now, the shape of what is happening settling over me, her duty pulling one direction, every instinct I own pulling the other, and the gap between them widening by the second. "You will not walk into Malachar's kill line alone. I will find another way."

I must find another way.

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CYBELE