Page 41 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

I don't know how long I sit there before the tears come.

They don't announce themselves. One moment my eyes are dry and the next I'm crying the ugly, breathless kind with no dignity in it, surrounded by centuries of evidence that everything I was taught was a lie constructed to make murderers feel righteous. The torch is burning low. The shadows on the ceiling press closer.

Then stone grinds against stone somewhere behind me and the heavy door at the crypt entrance swings inward. Torchlight shifts as he blocks it and Tovian fills the doorway.

He takes in the scattered ledgers. The open correspondence. My face.

He doesn't speak. He doesn't ask. He simply crosses the crypt and lowers himself onto the cold stone floor beside me. His wing unfolds slowly and wraps around me from behind and blocks out the damp dark. Suddenly the cold is gone, replaced by the enormous solid heat of his chest against my back.

His arms come around me last. Careful. Catastrophically gentle.

"You found Sevrik," his voice is like the mountain itself, old and deep and immovable.

I press my hands against the stone veining of his forearms and hold on.

"I'm sorry," I whisper. "For all of it. For what they did to you."

A long silence. His chin drops to the top of my head.

"I know," he whispers.

22

TOVIAN

The canvas tears open and Velka Mire stumbles through it. She looks the way everyone in this camp looks after four weeks of fighting inside enemy lines — armor crusted in dark mud, copper skin streaked with blood that isn't entirely hers. The war tent goes silent instantly. Every Ashwing commander at the strategy table lifts their head.

"They hit the eastern flank." Her voice is controlled, but barely. "Tharros sent his elite vanguard — we didn't see them until they were already inside the formation. The human squad was overrun in less than a quarter hour."

Sabine steps forward from beside the table. "Leif was with that squad."

The silence that follows isn't the absence of sound. It's the presence of dread.

Velka meets Sabine's eyes, and in that half second of hesitation I know exactly what kind of news she's carrying. My wings pull close against my spine.

"He was taken." Velka's voice drops.

Sabine makes a sound I will never forget. Not a scream. Worse — a small, fractured exhale, like a load-bearing wall giving way inside her chest.

I am already moving.

"There's more." Velka doesn't let the silence breathe. "Tharros sent a message back through one of our scouts. Meant to be heard by every rank in this camp."

Her eyes cut to me briefly, then back to Sabine. "He's issued a formal challenge to the Ashwing Alpha. The terms are —" She stops. Steadies herself. "Sabine walks into his hands alone, or he crushes the boy's skull on the peak at dawn."

The tent goes completely still.

Tharros. His name sits like a stone behind my teeth. Every tactical instinct I have fires simultaneously — this is a trap, layered and deliberate, designed to drag me into the open on his terms. He didn't take Leif because the boy matters. He took him because Sabine does. Because I do. Because he knows exactly how a mate bond fractures an Alpha's judgment.

He is counting on me to break.

Sabine is trembling. She doesn't realize it — her spine is rigid, her chin up, her hands fisted at her sides — but I can see it in the fine tension running through her shoulders, the barely restrained shaking in her jaw. Her face has gone pale beneath the mountain wind's weathering. Storm-gray eyes fixed somewhere past Velka, past the tent walls, past every solid thing in front of her.

"This is my fault." Her voice is very quiet. "He targeted Leif because of me. Because of what I am to —" She stops herself. Swallows.

I don't give her time to finish fracturing.

My hands find her shoulders, and I feel her flinch before she steadies. My palms are enormous against her. I am aware of howeasily I could overwhelm her simply by existing too close. I don't pull back.