Page 58 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

Rael locked the gate. Rael, who shared meat with us at the festival table, sealed us inside and poisoned the air.

My clan died choking on sulfur because one of my own commanders was hungry for land he hadn't bled for.

The chamber walls press inward. The torchlight seems too far away. My hands—I notice them distantly—are trembling against my thighs, and the ash I rubbed into my skin is flaking from the vibration of it, and I can’t seem to make my lungs function in any pattern that resembles breathing.

Human betrayal was a wound. Rael is something else entirely.

Human betrayal made sense, in the cold and ugly way that fear always makes a certain kind of sense. But this—this is a crack running straight through the foundation of everything I believed I knew about my own blood.

"Tovian."

Sabine's voice. Close. I hadn't heard her move.

Her hands close around mine—both of them, her small human palms pressed against the backs of my fists, grounding. Warm. Alive. An unbearable contrast to everything else in this moment.

"Look at me."

I look at her.

"Whatever just happened in your head," she says, quiet and fierce and terrifyingly certain, "your past was built on rot you didn't plant. You didn't put it there. Rael did. Sevrik did." She tightens her grip.

"But this—" She releases one of my hands and presses her palm flat against my chest, over the hollow ache cracking through my sternum. "This territory is yours. What we are building here is yours. That doesn't belong to any of them. Not their ambition, not their ghosts, not their history. It belongs to you. And it belongs to what comes after tomorrow."

"After you win," she concludes. As if it is settled. As if she simply decided it would be and now it is the only available outcome.

I press my forehead down against hers and breathe. Vorgrym leaves quietly, and I pull her against my chest.

My wings fold around us both. A dark, private quiet. Just her heartbeat against my ribs. Just the small, fierce warmth of her pressed into me like she always knew she belonged there.

I tip her chin up with two fingers and her breath catches in the half-second before my mouth finds hers.

She tastes like mountain cold and a deep, sun-baked mineral scent that is uniquely her own. I kiss her the way I have wanted to all night—slow and deliberate and devastating. My hand slides from her jaw into her hair, fisting there until she makes a soft, broken sound against my lips that travels the length of my spine like fire through a fuse.

I feel her fingers curl into the stone planes of my chest, gripping, pulling. I tilt her head back further and take more of her, ruined by my own hunger, because tomorrow is a cathedral and a trial and Tharros' teeth, and tonight she is warm and alive and mine, and I need that truth pressed into my mouth where I can keep it.

When I finally pull back, her lips are swollen and her eyes are dark and slightly dazed, the sight of her wrecked by nothing more than my mouth.

I press my forehead to hers. "Sabine." Her name comes out rough and low.

"Mm."

"If I fall tomorrow?—"

She pulls back immediately.

"You run," I say. "You take Leif. You leave the mountain and you don't look back." I hold her gaze with everything I have. "Swear it to me."

"No."

"Sabine—"

"No." Her eyes are wet at the edges and her voice is absolutely steady and I don’t know how she manages both simultaneously. "I'm not swearing to abandon you. Not tonight. Not ever. You don't get to make that kind of request and then tell me I'm not your equal. Pick one."

I turn my face into her palm. Press my mouth there. Close my eyes.

"Then survive," I say against her skin. "Whatever else happens. Survive."

She wraps her arms around my neck and holds on. I pull her close enough that there is no space left between us, no cold, no mountain, no rival clans waiting in the dark.