Page 37 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

Father Corren leans over the map. His tired eyes travel the blueprint lines slowly.

Velka looks surprised, "That's actually?—"

"Sound," Father Corren says quietly.

I finally look up. Tovian is watching me. Not the map. Not the council. Me. His expression is raw in a way I have never seen on him before — cracked open around the edges.

The meeting disperses into tense, grudging motion. Velka is already issuing modified orders under her breath as she pushesthrough the tent flap. Father Corren squeezes my shoulder once, wordlessly, and follows.

I step out into the freezing night air and breathe.

The cold hits like a hand against my face. Above the tree line, a fire is burning. Orange light pulses against the fog. I stare through it, eyes fixed and empty.

"Sabine."

Leif's boots crunch through the blood-dusted snow. He catches up to me a few steps from the tent, and when I turn to look at him, the expression on his face makes my chest seize. He looks like he’s spent a long time choosing silence and has finally run out of road.

"Leif—"

"Why do you always choose him?”

“Leif, what are you talking about?”

"You've been doing it for weeks. You finish his sentences in meetings. You position yourself between him and anyone he doesn't trust yet. You look for him first when there's a sound outside the tent." He pauses. "Sabine. You move around him like he's your north."

The wind cuts through my coat.

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.

All roads lead to him.

The thought arrives without warning—map lines converging, every argument, every infuriating decree, every moment of sitting beside him in the dark while he stares at casualty scrolls and won't let anyone see that it's hurting him. Every time I've hated him. Every time I haven't. The terrifying arithmetic of it all suddenly resolves into a single, undeniable sum.

I love him.

Not the bond. Not the silver markings climbing my wrists. Me. Sabine. I love this monstrous, wounded, insufferablecreature who builds cages out of panic and calls it devotion, and I am completely, catastrophically lost.

"Oh." The word comes out very small. "Oh, that's—that's a significant problem."

Leif lets out a breath, reaches out, and squeezes my hand once, hard.

The heavy canvas flap of the command tent lifts and Tovian steps into the moonlight.

He stops.

The distant war sounds continue—steel and stone and wind through pines. None of it touches this moment. He stands in the cold with his wings tucked and his massive chest rising and falling in a rhythm that gives him away completely, and his face?—

His face is ruined.

Every line of the warlord stripped away. Every layer of the dominant Alpha, the territorial beast, the creature who locked me out of meetings and decreed my movements like I was his to command. Gone. What's left is a rawness enormous enough to fill the room, and underneath it, a creature quietly overwhelmed.

He heard us.

He heard me.

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TOVIAN