Page 28 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

But standing here now, in the torchlit quiet, watching her sleep beside maps she drew to save a territory that was never hers to save, I understand something the bond can’t manufacture.

I don't want her compliance.

I don't want her body or her proximity or the biological certainty of her scent marking my skin.

I want her eyes on me — the way she sometimes does when she thinks I am not watching — and choose this. Choose to stay. Not because ancient magic demands it, but because I have given her something worth staying for. I want…

I want her trust.

15

SABINE

The answer arrives the way the worst truths always do: quietly, without ceremony, while I'm hunched over a cold table in the early hours of the morning with ink-stained fingers and Father Corren's handwriting swimming before my tired eyes.

I read the same passage for the fourth time, because surely I am wrong. Surely I have misread something. Surely the pieces don't fit together the way they do in my head right now, clean and terrible and obvious.

They do.

Centuries ago, humans and gargoyles didn't simply coexist in fragile tolerance. They built something. A structured peace. A civilization layered between two species who needed each other. The murals on the great cavern walls weren't decoration—they were a record. A proud one. The ironwork sealing the primary exit of that cavern was not a fortification built from the outside by victorious humans. It was built from inside knowledge.

Someone who knew the exact tolerances of gargoyle stone. Someone who understood how to breach a subterranean sulfur pocket without triggering a collapse. Someone who knew exactlyhow much toxic air it would take to push creatures made of living earth into a suffocating, permanent sleep.

Not kill them. Trap them.

Killing would have been brutal. Whoever helped Sevrik Mourne seal that cavern wanted the gargoyles contained, weakened, and forgotten. Alive but helpless. Buried under their own cathedral while their killers walked free above them.

I feel sick. Not the anxious, unsteady nausea of exhaustion—actual sickness, hot and pressing in my throat. I press my palm flat against the stone table until the cold of it grounds me. Outside, the mountain breathes its low, dark wind. Down the corridor, gargoyle stone creaks as warriors shift in early wakefulness.

Somewhere beneath me, buried alive for centuries, was an entire civilization.

And my ancestors cheered.

I don't hear Tovian enter. He simply appears, filling the doorway of our private chamber like a storm deciding to stand still for a moment.

"You haven't slept."

He crosses the room in three steps, looks down at the papers spread across my table, and says nothing. Then he reaches past me and begins rolling the most fragile of the scrolls closed with a surprising gentleness for hands that could crack stone without effort.

"We move in an hour," he says. "Scouting formation. You're coming."

I don't argue. I've learned which battles with him are worth having before dawn.

He hauls me upright by the elbow and steers me toward the great cavern where the others have already begun staging supplies. I'm still half inside my own head, still seeing sulfurchannels carved through ancient rock, and I don't immediately notice that he's stopped walking.

I notice when his hands settle on my shoulders and he begins brushing the fine gravel dust from the back of my winter coat with the flat of his palm.

I go very still.

He works methodically, the same hands capable of tearing through solid rock moving across the worn wool of my coat with something that is almost careful. Then he reaches up and plucks a piece of grit from my braid, and another from near my temple, and his face holds the same expression it does when he's studying a map—focused, quiet, intent.

"What are you doing," I say.

"You had half the ceiling in your hair."

"So?"

"It bothers me."