Page 21 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

Then he tears himself away.

His wings snap back. His footsteps are violent against the stone floor. He doesn't speak and he doesn't look back, and the door grinds shut behind him with a rumbling finality like a mountain settling.

I stand against the cold wall, trembling, the blade in my hand and a hunger in my chest that I have absolutely no idea what to do with.

12

TOVIAN

The pass is a killing ground.

I knew it the moment we rounded the ridge and the wind died — that sudden, unnatural quiet before stone and bodies begin to fall. Tharros's scouts pour from the ledges above us like water from a cracked dam, and then there is nothing left in my skull but war.

I take the first two scouts apart before they clear the rock face. Another one catches my shoulder with a spiked mace, grinding against the stone-thick muscle there, and the flesh there splits open beneath the blow. It doesn't slow me. I close my fist around his wing joint and crush it, dropping him screaming into the snow, and wheel to block the next strike.

There are too many. Not so many that I can’t kill them — but enough that I can’t be everywhere at once.

I am aware of Sabine the way I am aware of my own heartbeat. She is twelve feet to my left, back pressed to the rock face, the drakestone blade in her hand slick with black gargoyle blood. She is keeping herself alive. The thought should comfort me.

It doesn't.

Stay alive. Stay behind me. Stay?—

The scout drops from the ledge directly above my blind spot. I catch the movement half a second too late — wings folded tight for speed, blade angled for my exposed neck. My body is already rotating, already too slow?—

Sabine moves.

She steps into the line. One clean, brutal arc. The drakestone blade goes through the attacker's throat with a sound like marshy gravel, and he folds at her feet.

The world goes white.

I stop thinking.

The remaining scouts learn quickly what it means to draw blood within reach of a bonded Alpha. I don't count them. I don't remember their faces. I am stone and fury and centuries of grief made physical, and I don’t stop until there is nothing left standing in the pass but windblown red snow and Sabine, both hands gripping the blade, watching me with wide eyes.

The cavern isquiet when we return. The fire is up and she has already dug bandaging from the supply pack before I've fully folded my wings, because she is relentlessly practical even when her hands are shaking.

"Sit," she says.

I sit on the stone bench and say nothing while she moves behind me. The lacerations across my shoulders are deep. The cold air bites into the exposed meat of them and I don't care. What I care about is the frantic, stumbling rhythm of her pulse — I can hear it from here, high and fast and unsteady, and I know it isn't entirely fear.

Her fingers find the first wound.

The touch moves through me like a fault line splitting.

I think. Don't touch me. I think. I am not safe right now.

She keeps going. Her breath is shallow. The chamber smells of iron and sweat and beneath both, a warmth that belongs only to her, familiar and quietly dismantling me for weeks.

Her palm brushes the top of my spine.

I catch her wrists before whatever is left of my control dissolves entirely.

"Tovian—"

"If you keep touching me,” I say, rough and dangerous. “I can’t promise what comes next."

She doesn't pull away.