Page 39 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

I let the canvas fall behind me and stand in the dark.

She slows your decisions. Drevkan's voice still echoes, and the worst part — the part that nearly made me tear him apart beside Reth — is that he isn't entirely wrong.

I watch the soft curve of her shoulder rise and fall.

She doesn't slow me. She terrifies me.

And I have spent every day since waking from Stone Sleep trying to dress that terror up as dominance. Wrapping it in Alpha instinct and possessive law and gargoyle right, because terror is something I don’t know how to carry openly. Terror is not something I ever had to carry before her.

I have ruled this mountain for hundreds of years. I have killed rival Alphas with my bare hands, held my clan together through famine and siege and betrayal. Fear was never a thing that lived in me with any permanence.

And then she smeared blood across my face and my chest cracked open like ancient stone.

The memory surfaces against my will.

Sulfur. The smell hits me first. Then the sound. The iron doors. That heavy, deliberate finality of iron slamming into stone, and then the silence beyond it that told me no one was coming to open them again. I remember the heat. The way the deep vents opened like wounds and the air turned toxic — reaching inside my chest and weakening the stone of them soft.

I remember her.

Not Sabine. Tovyos. The one I failed centuries before Sabine was ever born. I remember watching the gray creep across her hands first, and the way she looked at me when she understood what was happening — not with blame, which might have been survivable, but with a grief so complete it had already accepted the ending. I remember her voice going quiet. I remember her petrifying mid-breath.

I remember that I could not stop it.

I have not let myself remember that since I emerged from the forced slumber. Standing in the dark of Sabine's tent with nothing to do but be still and honest, I understand with devastating clarity that I have been keeping her caged, controlled, and furiously within arm's reach not because Alpha law demands it.

Because I can’t survive watching that happen again.

I step closer. Her breathing doesn't change. I lower myself until I am crouched beside the cot, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from her skin, and I stay there in the dark watching over her the way I should have been watching then — before the doors closed, before the poisoned air spread, before I woke up to silence and ash.

"You will not die that way." My voice is barely sound. Just shape and breath and the weight of a vow older than the cathedral ruins. "I will pull this mountain apart stone by stone. I will slaughter every rival clan from here to the eastern ridge. I will burn whatever I have to burn."

I watch the slow rise and fall of her shoulder.

"You will not die the way she did. I swear it on everything I have left."

She doesn't hear me. She sleeps on, steady and warm and alive, with no idea that the monster crouching in the dark beside her is being held together by the sound of her breathing alone.

21

SABINE

Three weeks into the fight, and the deepest archive of the old cathedral now smells like the inside of a grave.

The ones I tend above ground where mountain wind scrubs everything clean and cold. This smell is older. Stagnant water pooled somewhere in the dark. Parchment decomposing slowly into nothing. Stone so ancient it has forgotten sunlight entirely. Father Corren holds the torch ahead of me and the flame barely makes a dent in it.

"Watch the third step," he says without looking back. "It's not there anymore."

I skip it. My boot finds solid ground one step lower and I adjust, pressing one hand against the crypt wall to steady myself. The stone is damp beneath my palm. Everything down here is damp — the air, the walls, the rotting wooden frames that once held shelving along the corridor. Most of it has collapsed inward, leaving stacks of scrolls and ledgers piled on the floor in shapes that look almost intentional. Almost like someone stacked them before the ceiling forgot to hold.

"How did you even know this existed?" I ask.

"Because my predecessor's predecessor wrote about it in a margin note," Father Corren says. "And because it was the one section of the cathedral archives explicitly forbidden to clergy."

"Forbidden things always end up being the most interesting."

"That," he says with a chuckle, "has been my experience as well."

We go deeper.