Page 52 of Bite Bonded Bride

"My ancestors managed a problem," he says. "I've simply maintained their work. The Vrakken were a destabilizing force. Dangerous, territorial, resistant to governance. The Wildspont was a surgical solution." He pauses. "That it took this long to finish the job is honestly an embarrassment to their legacy."

Surgical. Centuries of starvation. Children born into dying tunnels. My mother's hands covered in ritual scars from trying to hold together a kingdom that was bleeding from a wound she didn't know was man-made. He calls that surgical.

The hunger climbs, raw and rising, into my throat. Hot, black and roaring.

Across the room, Cybele's voice drops low—go, the left passage, follow it until you hear voices, don't stop—and I sense the chamber shift as Edrin moves. As she stays.

Stubborn, brilliant, impossible woman.

"You've leashed yourself," Malachar says, his gaze drifting briefly toward where she stands. A slow, contemptuous smile. "I wondered if it was a rumor. A Vrakken prince and a human cartographer. How poetic and ruinous." He clicks his tongue. "That is what destroyed your people the first time, you know. Compassion. Restraint. Your ancestors showed mercy when they should have shown teeth. And here you are, repeating the same mistake, wearing a human woman like a collar."

I go very still at how mechanical he is.

"A leash," I say quietly. "That's what you see."

"That's what it is."

I look at him for an extended period.

"Then you've never loved anything your entire miserable years of life."

His expression doesn't change. A flicker passes behind his eyes, cold and dismissive and, beneath it, uncomprehending. He truly doesn't know what I mean. That's the most damning thing.

He reaches into his coat and draws the blade. Long and black and etched along its fuller with runes I recognize, an anti-Vrakken binding script, old enough to have been forged for the ancient war. It was made to kill my kind. Made with intention and planning and centuries of hatred pressed into steel.

"Let's be honest with each other," Malachar says pleasantly. "One last time. Blade to blade, as your people prefer."

I crack my neck and let my claws extend fully.

"So be it." I agree.

Malachar fights fast, precise, and utterly without mercy, the blade moving in tight, economic arcs designed to wound rather than kill outright, to exhaust. The runes burn cold when they connect. A slash across my forearm sends white fire up to my shoulder, and for a while the darkness in my blood screams.

I push it back. Clamp down on it hard.

Find north.

She's still in this room. I know without looking. I can feel the thread between us—bright and steady, a tether of light cutting through the shadow and corruption like a lamp held against a storm. My blood in her veins, her heartbeat a frequency I've memorized without meaning to. She is there. She is whole. And as long as that thread holds, the hunger cannot swallow me whole.

Malachar strikes again. I catch his wrist and throw him sideways into the chamber wall and the stone cracks, he rebounds faster than I expect, and I take the returning blow across my ribs because I let him land it.

He wants pain to make me feral. He wants me uncontrolled.

He wants me to become the monster he always told his people I was.

I straighten. I breathe.

I hit him three times—chest, throat, jaw—and he goes down on one knee. Finally, his expression cracks. Beneath the polish: fear. Pure fear.

He sees what I am now. Not a beast. Not a broken thing clawing at the stone of a dying kingdom. An intelligence like his. A man who has chosen.

His eyes shift toward the mechanism.

No—

He lunges sideways. The blade drives into the ancient stone housing of the stabilization mechanism, and the runes on its surface detonate into violet light rupturing into blinding white, the mechanism shrieking like a living thing, the mountain groaning from its foundations to its peak.

I cross the space between us in a single breath.