Page 60 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

I look down.

The stone beneath my knees is old. Ancient. In the cracks of it, the dark, ground-in staining is not a shadow or a trick of the light. It is a century of frost and wind failing to erase the evidence of a slaughter.

So much blood that the mountain itself seems to hold the scent of it, a copper-heavy confession rising from the granite.

It was never humans against gargoyles. It was never fear against power. The true monster has always been the unchecked, parasitic ambition festering within the elite of both races. A common rot wearing different faces in different rooms.

"The Ashwing Alpha stands before you mate-bonded to a human." Tharros gestures toward me. "Weakened. Compromised. Everything we built this world to prevent."

He looks directly at Tovian. "Today you all watch him prove it."

They drag me to the center of the altar alone. My wrists ache where the silver markings itch with a sudden, cold tension, but I don't give Tharros the satisfaction of a flinch.

Tovian lunges forward so hard the chains groan. Two gargoyles throw their full weight against him from behind and he still moves them half a foot before the drakestone bites and he staggers, choking against the collar.

"Let go of her! Sabine?—!"

The drakestone blade Tharros produces is small. Black-veined stone with an edge that catches the pale dawn light like a sliver of mirror.

He is not in a hurry. I realise as he steps back from Tovian with composed, deliberate ease. He could kill me in seconds and be done with it. But that isn't the point. The point is the thousands of eyes watching — every clan he needs to convince, every watching Alpha seeing exactly how long it takes a mate-bonded ruler to come apart over a human woman's blood.

The first cut he makes opens across my left shoulder and I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to bleed rather than make a sound. The drakestone edge disrupts some warmth the mate bond has settled in my bones, and the cold rushes in to fill the space.

Don't scream. Don't give him anything.

The second cut crosses the first. Blood hits the frost-rimed stone in a dark scatter.

I lock my eyes on Tovian.

He is shaking. His entire body is trembling with the effort of staying still. His eyes have gone fully molten, no longer gold but hotter. Every muscle in his face is rigid. His hands—where the chains allow them to curl—are clenched so hard I can see cracks forming beneath his knuckles.

Hold on, I beg him silently. Please. Hold on.

The third cut is the deepest. The mountain air hits the wound before I'm ready and I can't help the sound that tears out of me—half-gasp, half-cry, swallowed almost immediately. My vision whites at the edges. The stone floor sways.

Tharros leans close and says, quiet enough that only I can hear, "All I need is thirty more seconds."

I look past him.

I find Tovian's eyes.

And I watch him look at the stone floor beneath me.

I watch him see the blood.

His blood. Old blood. Their blood—his people, his family, his clan. And now mine on top of it.

The chains explode, fragmenting into shrapnel that scatters across the altar in a ringing, shrieking burst. The gargoyles holding him stumble backward. One is simply thrown.

Tovian rises.

His stone skin has gone dark. An absence of color so complete it looks like a wound cut into the world. His eyesblaze with a cold, blinding slate-fire, ancient and terrible. The ground beneath the cathedral splinters—deep, resonant fractures tearing outward from his feet like the stone itself is afraid, the mountain groaning beneath as though recoiling from the force that has just been unleashed.

32

TOVIAN

The third cut opens across her collarbone.