Page 50 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

He lost control, they're thinking. He butchered half a raiding company in open view because a human woman bled.

I let the silence stretch until it becomes its own kind of violence. Then I say, very quietly, "Go."

Vorgrym waits until the last of them files out before he turns to me. "They will send word to Tharros before dawn."

"I know."

"You handed him the narrative."

"I know that too."

I press my fists against the war table and stare at the carved map beneath my hands. Blackstone Valley. The cathedral. The passes crawling with enemy markers. I slaughtered those soldiers to keep Sabine breathing, and in doing so I gave Tharros and Flora a weapon sharper than any blade they carry—the image of an Alpha brought to his knees by instinct. A king who can’t govern himself.

The bitter irony of it carves straight through my chest. Centuries buried beneath a mountain. Centuries of Stone Sleep and sulfur and suffocating stone, and I survived all of it. I clawed myself back from nothing, rebuilt fractured authority from a pile of sleeping warriors and ancient law—and I am losing it all to the sight of her blood soaking through a bandage.

I don't regret a single kill.

That's the part none of them will ever understand.

A scout barrels into the tent. He's young, barely past his first territorial molt.

"Speak," I say.

"The human woman." He swallows. "She's—she's packing, my lord. The border scouts saw her at the eastern edge of camp. She has her pack. The boy is with her. She's heading toward the valley trail."

The war table cracks beneath my hands.

I'm already moving before the sound stops echoing.

I find her at the tree line.

The mountain forest is black and frozen at this hour, frost glittering across every surface like scattered bone fragments, and she is moving through it with her head down. Her pack sits crooked on her shoulders. One arm is still heavily bandaged from the raid.

I drop from the tree canopy and the impact shakes the ground. Frost explodes from the undergrowth in a silver cloud. She spins?—

And I am already there.

My wings spread wide, cutting off the trail behind her. My hands close around her arms before she can take a single step back and I press her against the nearest oak, bark cracking beneath the force, frost-rimed wood splintering at her shoulders.

My talons extend.

I feel them scrape against the tree on either side of her head. Eight inches of stone-hardened claw that could split granite. I feel the branch shudder. I feel her breath, sharp and shallow, against my jaw.

"Tovian—"

"Don't." My voice doesn't sound like mine. It sounds like something older. "Don't you dare finish that sentence."

"I have to?—"

"You are not leaving this mountain."

She looks up at me and the grief behind her eyes mirror mine so precisely it stops the breath in my throat.

I see myself in her eyes.

What I look like. What I am doing.

Wings spread. Talons out. Body caged over hers in the dark like I am one reflex away from dragging her into the earth and burying her there so nothing can reach her. A prison built from the only thing I know how to do when I am afraid.