Page 42 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

"Look at me. You are not walking into his hands." I watch her try to argue and I don't let her get there. "That is not a point of negotiation. It is not a question I am entertaining. We are not discussing it."

"But —"

"Tharros didn't take your brother because of a strategic advantage." My grip on her shoulders tightens to anchor her to this moment, this tent, this breath. "He took him because he wants to watch you grieve. Because pain makes you reckless and reckless makes you walk straight into a trap. He has been planning this since the moment he knew you existed."

The blankness in her eyes cracks open. She's too sharp for false comfort and I stopped trying to offer it weeks ago.

"So we take his trap apart." I release her shoulders and turn back to the table. "Vorgrym. Full vanguard — drakestone armor, short blades, nothing that catches moonlight. I want scouts on the eastern ridgeline before the next watch rotates."

Vorgrym's single eye finds mine. The acknowledgement moves between us without words.

"Understood," he says.

The tent erupts into motion. Drakestone armor buckled over stone-gray wings, the low rhythmic scrape of blades drawn across whetstones, the guttural exchange of Ashwing commanders confirming formations. My warriors don't speak loudly before combat. They never have. Noise is for creatures that need courage manufactured for them.

I move through it efficiently. Every order placed. Every flank accounted for. My mind maps the terrain between here and where Tharros will have positioned himself — the exposed ridgeline, the false valley beyond the peak, the natural choke points an Alpha would know by instinct.

I know his mind. I was made from the same stone he was.

It is the only advantage I have tonight.

Sabine is hovering at the tent's torchlight when I come back to her. She's watching the preparations. Her coat is buttoned to the throat. The ancient blade Vorgrym gave her is at her hip.

The camp's noise recedes around us briefly — a seam in the urgency where two people can exist in what almost resembles privacy.

Her face lifts up to me.

There's reverence in them that she hasn't tried to disguise. It is the most unguarded I have ever seen her, stripped of sarcasm and stubbornness by the sheer weight of what is in front of us.

"You know it's a trap." Her voice is steady. She is steadier than she was twenty minutes ago. This woman recollects herself with a speed that still manages to surprise me. "You know he designed this specifically to pull you into the open. You know that and you're going anyway."

"Yes."

She exhales. "Why?"

The answer is sitting directly behind my tongue, heavy and absolute. I have felt it for weeks and refused to name it because naming it made it real, and real things can be destroyed.

I look down at her — small, storm-gray, stubborn to her marrow — and I let it be real.

"Because there is not a kingdom standing on this earth that I would not watch burn to ash and cinders before I let you suffer. Before I let you walk into his hands. Before I let him touch anything that is mine."

Sabine stares at me, mouth parting.

The silence between us is full of every word neither of us has said directly, every moment in the dark caverns and the war tents and the tunnels where the ground shifted between us and we both pretended not to notice.

I see her throat move, see the exact moment it moves her past the point of no return.

I turn toward the ledge.

The mountain air hits immediately — frozen, thin, carrying the smell of snow and enemy smoke from somewhere east. My wings spread on instinct, reading the currents. Below the tent line, Vorgrym has the vanguard assembled, dark shapes against a darker mountain.

"Tovian."

I turn.

Sabine is standing at the ledge beside me. Jaw set. Shoulders squared. Her fingers are wrapped tight around the hilt of the drakestone blade, knuckles pale with the cold and the grip.

She looks me dead in the eye.