Page 18 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

"She is the reason they wake," I say, loud enough that every warrior in that vault hears it clearly. "Her bond to me accelerated what would have taken months into hours. Every warrior standing in this hall right now stands here because of her. Not despite her. The human is mine. She is bonded. She is untouchable. Any claw that moves toward her answers to me personally, and I will not be brief about it."

The growling stops.

Vorgrym holds my stare before dropping to one knee. Behind him, like a slow tide pulling back from shore, the warriors follow. Stone knees hitting stone floors, one after another, until the only sound in the vault is the distant drip of snowmelt through the mountain rock above us.

Sabine says nothing. I can feel her behind me, warm and very still.

I fold my wings.

She doesn't speak until we reach the war room. Then she drops onto the bench beside the planning table, pulls the nearest territorial map toward her, and gets to work as though two hundred furious gargoyles did not just spend the last several minutes fantasizing about dismembering her.

I watch her from across the table.

She has commandeered three torches and arranged them in a loose triangle around the maps for maximum light. Her braid has mostly collapsed and she keeps shoving it back over oneshoulder absently as she leans forward. She traces the cavern network with one finger, lips moving slightly, counting.

I should be reviewing the defensive perimeter reports stacked on my side of the table.

I stare at her instead.

"This tunnel." She taps a passage on the oldest map, the one drawn in faded iron-gall ink that barely survives contact with air. "It's listed here as a drainage channel. Secondary function. Do you know if it's still passable?"

"Where does it exit?"

"Eastern cliff face, below the frost line." She looks up. "Which means it comes out behind any force moving up the main mountain pass from the valley."

I move around the table and look where she is pointing. She is right. The passage predates the cathedral itself, carved when the mountain was first settled, and it runs directly beneath what would become Tharros's most logical approach route when the dominance challenge arrives.

"If Tharros commits his forward line to the main pass," she says, "and you hold them there long enough, something smaller and faster could come through here and cut off the retreat entirely."

I stare at the map.

In three centuries of territorial warfare, not one of my commanders flagged that tunnel. Not once.

"You read topographical survey documents for entertainment?" I ask.

She looks up, one brow raised. "I read whatever tells me how not to die. Are we going to use it or not?"

Something shifts in my chest. Quiet and dangerous, like a fault line adjusting beneath its own weight. I have spent centuries commanding warriors by blood and law, by the weight of Alpha authority that brooks no challenge. I have neveronce sat across a table from someone and felt this particular sensation, the startling recognition of an equal mind.

The bond is not responsible for this.

I straighten up. "We'll use it."

She nods and goes back to the maps. I go back to staring at her.

By the thirdhour past midnight, the torches have burned low.

I notice she has stopped tracing routes and started simply resting her chin on her folded arms. I notice the slight heaviness in her shoulders. I notice, before she does, the exact moment she stops fighting it.

She goes still all at once, the way exhausted things do, and her breathing deepens against the parchment.

Asleep. Entirely unguarded. Four feet away from me.

The demand that rises in me is not subtle. It is not polite. It is a thing with weight and teeth and centuries of accumulated instinct behind it, and it says: gather her up, pull her against your chest, wrap your wings around her until no threat in this mountain or the next can reach her, and don’t let go until the world has ended and remade itself entirely.

I curl my hands against the edge of the table instead.

She wouldn't choose this. If she were awake, she would move to the opposite side of the room out of sheer principle, and she would do it with that flat, storm-gray stare that makes her look like she's daring the world to inconvenience her.