Page 17 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

Leif stares at me, unblinking. Then he looks at Tovian. Then back at me again. He doesn't say anything.

Tovian speaks into the quiet. Low and unadorned, the way he delivers every hard truth.

"She will come back. Tharros won't stop sending packs until the valley has no one left worth burning. This ends only one way." He looks down at me. "When I reclaim this territory."

I hold his gaze. His wounds are seeping through the linen I pressed to his side. He hasn't even looked at them.

"Then we help you reclaim it," I say.

"You'll need a hunter."

Velka steps out of the smoke to our left, bow in hand, home reduced to glowing cinders behind her. She looks at Tovian without flinching, which is more than most of the valley can claim tonight.

"My house is ash." She says dryly. "So I have some time."

10

TOVIAN

Sabine is three paces ahead of me in the lower vaults, her torch held high, breath misting in the frost-rimed air, when the stone around us moves. A slow, deep crack splits the chest of the warrior closest to the passage wall. Then another. Then a third, like a chorus answering a call none of them consciously made.

Her blood. Her proximity. The First Blood Bond radiating off her skin like heat from an open hearth.

I stop walking.

"Sabine. Don't move."

She turns to look at me over her shoulder. "What?—"

The first warrior drops to the vault floor on all fours, stone skin shedding from his shoulders in sheets. Then the second. Then a dozen at once, a deep seismic crack, like the earth splitting beneath itself, echoing down the passage in both directions. The lower vaults stretch the length of the mountain's oldest roots, and every chamber along that corridor is beginning to breathe.

The awakening should take days. Weeks. The process is gradual, deliberate, a slow warming of the soul back into thebody. What is happening now is none of those things. What is happening now is violent and premature and entirely caused by the woman standing three feet away in full view, who is absolutely not listening when I tell her not to move.

"Tovian," she says, voice low, torch swinging as she tracks the movement spreading across the walls. "There are hundreds of them."

"I know."

"And they're waking up angry."

The first pair of molten eyes find her. Then another. Then ten pairs at once, all cutting through the dark to the single warm, breathing, living thing that does not belong in stone-carved halls built for creatures twice her size. The growl that builds is not from any one throat. It is from all of them simultaneously, a resonance that vibrates through the vault floor and up through the bones of my feet.

The last time these warriors were fully conscious, humans were sealing the exits above their heads.

Sabine takes one very deliberate step backward. Into me.

My wings open before I make the conscious decision to open them. They span the full width of the passage in a single motion, wall to wall, cutting Sabine from their line of sight completely. The growl doesn't stop. If anything, it deepens.

Vorgrym steps forward from the mass of newly woken warriors, his good eye catching the torchlight, torn wings dragging at his sides. He speaks before I do.

"You bring her here."

"I bring her where I choose." My voice is steady without a tinge of heat. Heat is for lesser Alphas who need it to compensate. "Stand down, Commander."

"They woke to the scent of human blood inside Ashwing stone." He gestures broadly at the warriors ranked behind him, dozens of them still shaking slabs of dormant skin from theirarms and shoulders, eyes locked on the wall of my wings as if they can burn through it by wanting it badly enough. "You can’t expect?—"

"I expect exactly what I am owed." I step forward once. The stone floor cracks beneath my weight. "Their loyalty."

Vorgrym doesn't move. He is the most disciplined soldier I have ever commanded, and that discipline is the only reason we are still having a conversation instead of a bloodbath.