Page 51 of Bite Bonded Bride

He stops at the threshold.

I nearly walk into his back.

"Zareth—"

"Don't speak," he says quietly. He's already assessed something I haven't seen yet.

I step up beside him and look through the chamber entrance.

The Wildspont chamber is vast, a cathedral of corrupted stone, violet light cascading from the massive rupture at its center in slow, terrible waves. Ancient mechanisms ring the chamber walls, their surfaces alive with runes that flicker and dim like a dying pulse. The air tastes like lightning and rot.

And Lord Malachar stands at the center of it.

Impeccable, as always. Black-and-gold robes unruffled despite the chaos consuming everything around him, white hair unmoved. He looks like a man attending a function he arranged himself.

Beside him, chained to one of the ancient mechanism's support columns with elven iron, is a thin figure with dark curls. A cane lying useless on the stone floor several feet away.

The sight strikes like a physical force, a pressure-slam directly to the sternum, and then a heat that floods up through it, white and furious and barely contained. It takes me three full seconds to trust my voice.

Zareth's hand is around my wrist before I take a single step forward. Malachar turns, and his violet eyes find mine with an unhurried ease.

"Cartographer," he says pleasantly. "I was beginning to think the tunnels had finished the conversation for me." His gaze moves to the records folded against my chest. Then back to my face. "I see they didn't. Unfortunate." A brief glance toward the column. Toward Edrin. "For everyone."

My brother lifts his head. Even from here I can see the bruising at his temple, the way he holds himself carefully against the chain's weight.

"Ly," he says, and his voice is steady and it breaks me completely.

28

ZARETH

The Wildspont chamber breathes like a living wound. Violet light bleeds from the ancient mechanism at the room's center, pulsing in irregular rhythms that mirror the failing magic beneath Hollow Mountain. The air tastes of copper and old stone and something darker beneath both. Something rotting. Malachar's soldiers form a loose perimeter around, maybe seven or eight. Armor bearing the black-and-gold sigil of his house. Faces that mean nothing to me.

Cybele is already moving her eyes the moment we cross the threshold. Her gaze cuts sideways, toward the soldiers on the far left passage, and half-hidden behind a collapsed pillar is Edrin, chained to an iron bracket in the wall, pale and frightened and trying very hard not to look it.

She looks back at me.

I see him. I can get to him. Give me an opening.

I don't nod. I don't have to. I walk forward instead.

The mutated soldiers die quickly. I don't let them make it a performance. Claws, shadow and the kind of brutality I stopped apologizing for decades ago, it's over before most of them understand it has begun. The last one hits the ground and the chamber goes quiet except for the labored groaning of the Wildspont mechanism and the soft, frantic sounds of Cybele working the chains from Edrin's wrists across the room.

Then Malachar speaks.

"Impressive." His voice is dry parchment and slow poison. Measured. Utterly unmoved by the eight bodies between us. "You've always been efficient at slaughter. One supposes that's what centuries in a hole produces."

He stands at the far edge of the violet glow, hands clasped behind his back. Bronze skin and white hair and those icy violet eyes that have never once reflected anything that looked like a soul. He doesn't move toward the exit. He doesn't reach for a weapon. He simply stands, like a man who believes the world was built to accommodate him.

He's not afraid. The thought unsettles me.

"Malachar."

"Prince Zareth." He tilts his head slightly, studying me the way a man studies an insect he finds mildly interesting. "Or are we dispensing with titles now? I understand you've been spending time with humans. Habits do tend to rub off."

Behind me, I hear the quiet clink of breaking chains. Keep going, Cybele.

"You engineered all of this," I say. A verdict.