Page 31 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

Velka tilts her head at me like she is genuinely curious what I am going to say next.

I want to tell Sabine no. Every territorial instinct I own screams it — screams to put her somewhere dark and sealed and surrounded by stone where nothing with teeth and intent can reach her. The urge sits inside my chest like a fist closing around a wound.

I breathe past it.

"Two guards," I say finally. "Vorgrym approves the patrol route. You stay within the assigned perimeter."

"Fine."

"And you don’t go near the cathedral grounds."

"Fine."

I don't tell her the rest. I don't tell her that fine means nothing, that I will be above her every night regardless — high enough that she can’t see me, low enough that nothing breathes near her without my knowledge. I don't tell her that the freezing mountain wind has started to feel like a reasonable price for the ability to watch her move safely through the lantern-lit streets below.

The nights becomea ritual I tell myself is strategy.

I leave the cavern after she sleeps, take the high updraft above the eastern ridge, and circle the settlement for hours with my wings folded to minimize the sound of my passage. Below me, Blackstone Valley glows faint amber through the fog. I track her movements by instinct — the heat of her, the particular rhythm of her pulse when she is tired versus when she is anxious. I have memorized both.

On the fourth night, she visits the cathedral.

She told me she wouldn't. I told myself I trusted her to honor it. I was wrong on both counts, apparently.

I am banking north above the forge quarter when a foreign pulse cuts through the ambient rhythm of the mountain — sharp, deliberate, and wrong — and I stop mid-flight.

Every hair on my body rises and I drop.

I don’t remember choosing to move. I remember the sound of my wings snapping wide, the rush of altitude gone in seconds, the cathedral ruins erupting into view beneath me — broken spires and shattered arches swallowed in mountain fog, the stained glass ceiling half-collapsed and gaping open like a wound.

I go through it.

Stone and colored glass explode outward as I hit the interior, and I land hard on the altar dais with enough force to crack the ancient flagstone beneath my feet. Dust cascades from the vaulted ceiling. A figure in dark-woven armor spins toward me — small, fast, already mid-lunge, one blade already descending toward the pale line of Sabine's exposed throat.

I cross the distance in less than a second.

My hand closes around the assassin's wrist before the blade connects. The crack of bone is immediate. The scream is brief. I drag them backward off their feet and slam them into the altar steps with every ounce of force I can summon — stone shatters under the impact, the ancient carved reliefs splitting apart beneath the body — and then I am on them, and it is not clean, and I don’t intend it to be.

It is over in seconds.

The silence after is total except for the wind pouring through the broken ceiling and the distant sound of the village.

I straighten.

The altar steps are dark with blood. The assassin's body lies broken across the ruins of a carving that once depicted gargoyle and human figures standing side by side. I stare at it for one strange, still moment.

Then I turn around.

I expect horror.

I have seen it enough times to know exactly what it looks like on a human face — the way the eyes go wide and fixed, the way the mouth opens without sound, the way they step backward even when they are trying to hold their ground. I have seen it on the faces of every human who has ever witnessed what I truly am up close and unrestrained.

Sabine is not stepping backward.

She stands two feet behind me on the altar dais, her drakestone blade still drawn, her knuckles pale around the grip.Her chest is heaving. A thin cut angles across her jaw where the assassin must have caught her before I arrived — already clotting, already darkening — and her eyes are blazing.

She looks like she is deciding who else needs to die and holds my gaze without so much as a flinch.

And then she moves.