He laughs once. It sounds broken. The bond hums, and for a heartbeat it is the only voice. I taste a memory that isn't mine: a stone floor slick with rain, someone placing a small crown in a hand, the weight of things named before him. Protective instinctfloods through me like adrenaline. This is absurd. This is also right.
Lucien goes dark. The animal rolls up inside him—fur, fangs, the sound of a low throat. He lashes out with a speed that should have split him open. He takes two men down in a motion that should have killed him. He stands over them, chest heaving, eyes animal, and for a terrifying instant I feel him give up the human leash.
"No," I say, soft.
He doesn't hear me. The bond surges, and the images betray him—how he remembers killing, how he learned the calculus of threats. I plunge my hands into his hair to hold him to me. My palms press to the back of his skull—skin to skin. He freezes like I've cut the sound out of the air.
My fingers find the small incision along his ribs. A clean through-and-through that breathes heat. He tastes of blood and cedar. I feel his heartbeat, dangerously fast.
We need a healer. We need a rite that threads shifter physiology and human trauma together. Lucien needs something older than sutures.
"Do you have the anchor?" he asks, voice a rasp.
I carry a thousand anchors in my life—board minutes, audits, emergency clauses. This is not one of them. Still, in my pocket is the thin ceremonial blade I took from the Night Court when I refused to leave without proof we were partners. I never planned to use it. I never planned to hold him while he bled.
He gives me a look that's part surrender, part demand. The bond is a conduit. It is not permission. It can be consent, if we let it be.
"Lucien—tell me what you need," I say.
He hisses something that translates into a shard of oath. "Touch. Speak the depth."
He asks for a healing rite that will thin the barrier between us in a way readable to those who read shifter signatures. It will bind. It will help him. It will change things both legal and ritual.
My brain catalogs risks—broadcast, trace, signatures blooming across the city's net. But my chest has already paid for risk in other currencies. If he dies, I lose a vital ally and the dossier pivots to accusation: she consorted with foreign nobles. If he lives, we might leverage his house's hold to get the proof I need.
I choose him.
He lets me wedge the blade against his skin—a small ceremonial nick—and warm blood beads. His breath catches. I press my palm to the wound and feel the bond fold into me like a map unfolding. It's intimate and clinical at once. The room narrows to the tempo of his pain and my breath.
I say the words Lucien taught me in the Night Court. They are not my language, but I can approximate the cadence. The trackers around us go quiet. Ana's equipment clicks—she refuses to stop even as I steal pieces of myself to save one man.
Lucien moans; his muscles tremble under my hands. The animal claws at the edges again. He wants to tear this place apart. I let him feel the leash I can offer: not control, but a mirror. My hand is steady. I speak with the same clarity I use in negotiations.
"Anchor to anchor. Heart to public. Stay here."
The bond answers with images—salt on cliffs, a throne-room, a child's laugh. The images arc like a bridge between two sovereignties: mine of contracts and his of blood. The ring of server fans becomes a high whine in my ears.
Heat creeps through the room. The servers' lights pulse—normal background logic until something in the ritual interface hiccups. Ana's tablet flashes: an outbound ping. Cameras in the complex cycle. My face drains cold.
This place is wired. The rivals expected forensics to bring people. They did not expect binding rites. The city is full of watchers. Surveillance webs eat light and sound and, increasingly, signatures.
"Signal," Ana breathes. Her fingers fly. "They're scraping everything. There's a forensic broadcast hooked into local networks. If the ritual finishes, the signatures will bloom out into the city's sensors."
My mouth goes dry. The healing is a public act in ritual terms. It will leave a trace in the net the way a signed contract leaves a legal trail.
Lucien's breath shudders. He is wounded and furious and somehow lush with desire while in pain. The bond thrums like a living thing; it answers to my touch and words. I find the rhythm to shift from healing to shielding without losing him.
"Cover the comms," I say. "Ana, cut nodes. Trackers, sweep ingress points. If we can isolate the local mesh?—"
"We don't have the time," Ana says. "They're mirroring to city nodes. It will radiate in sixty seconds if you?—"
"I can hide the signature," Lucien says. He's barely conscious but the will is iron. "I can bury it in an old line, ghost our trace. Work with me."
He reaches for me, clawing at composure. His hand is heavy, warm, and it wraps my wrist. For a beat he's lucid enough to be all dangerous intellect. He names an old protocol—an obsolete conduit I helped design for redundancy in the mapping platform, something I never imagined would be used like this.
"Do it," I say.
He grits his teeth and gives me a look that's half apology, half command. He draws breath, and I let the ritual continue. I sink deeper into the rhythm—blood, words, a pressure at the base of the skull like the final clause of a contract. My voice is hoarse.The trackers chant a counter-pattern. Ana wrestles code into knots.
