Rikard
He smelled the blood from the air.
Not the faint copper of a pricked finger or a nicked palm. This was a tide, heavy and mineral, saturating the air. He landed on the bedroom balcony, and the scent drove everything else from his mind: the flight, the ravine, the clean snap of Drogan’s spine. All of it gone, replaced by fear.
Wings screaming, heart screaming, he pushed against the door. It opened, which didn’t soothe his panic at all.
Neither did the sight of Aalis at the foot of the bed, her ancient hands red to the wrist. Betje knelt beside a dark, wet basin that had overflowed onto the floor, her spectacles spattered. Carlijn sat at the head of the bed, holding Hanna’s hand and talking to her in an urgent stream of words that Hanna couldn’t hear, because her eyes were closed and her face was the color of the bedlinens, and she wasn’t moving.
In the cradle by the window, a small, furious sound erupted. The child was alive.
But he could hardly register it because his wife was dying. Or perhaps he was too late and she was already dead. Perhaps he’d wasted his last hours with her on vengeance.
“Does she live?” he asked, as no one seemed to have noticed that he was in the room.
“Not for much longer. She’s lost too much blood.” The old mason spoke with the flat authority of a gargoyle who had seen centuries of births. “It was enough to break your mate bond. That’s why you can’t feel her. You must bite her again, quickly.”
“What? Why?” he asked, bewildered. His wings ached. Was this a terrible dream?
“The venom in a mating bite accelerates healing. Stops bleeding. It’s why mating bites heal cleanly when they’re given properly.” There was a note of reproof in Aalis’s voice for the layers of scars on Hanna’s shoulder. “If you bite her now, the venom may be enough to stop the hemorrhage and stabilize her, or it may not. But without it, she’ll surely be dead before dawn.”
Bite her.The thing he’d sworn he’d never do. This had to be a nightmare. A test of his resolve. But his claws dug into his palms, stinging, and Aalis motioned for him to move. This was all horribly, terribly real.
Rikard crossed the room and knelt beside the bed. Blood soaked into the knees of his breeches. Hannalinde’s hand wascold and limp when he took it. He squeezed her fingers, searching for any sign of life in them but finding none.
“Hanna.” Her name in his mouth had never sounded like this, so desperate and broken. He knew she didn’t want his bite. He’d sworn he wouldn’t bite her. It was the first and most important condition of their marriage. “Can you forgive me?”
He held his breath, waiting for some tiny sign that he should proceed. A twitch of a finger or the flutter of a lash,somethingto give him permission to do it.
“She can’t hear you,” Carlijn said from the other side of the bed. Her face was swollen and blotchy. “I’ve been talking to her, but she can’t—” Her voice broke and she pressed her knuckles to her mouth, turning away.
Rikard’s hand shook as he moved the shoulder of Hanna’s shift aside. Not the shoulder with the layers of old scars but the unblemished one.
He had to do it, didn’t he? If he bit her, the venom might save her life. And if it did, a bond would form between them, his consciousness flooding into hers and hers into his. She would wake and find a gargoyle’s teeth in her flesh and a new tether in her mind, except this time instead of Drogan, it would be Rikard, the gargoyle who’d promised never to do this.
She would never forgive him. The trust they’d built, stitch by patient stitch, would unravel in the short time it took his teeth to break her skin. Break his promises. He would lose her either way.
“Rikard, you must do it now.” Aalis’s voice cut through. “She has minutes, not hours.”
He leaned over her. Her breathing was shallow and reedy, barely there.
He chose the curve of her neck, just below her ear. The place where her pulse should have been strong and was instead a whisper.
“Forgive me,” he said, though she couldn’t hear him.
His teeth sank into her skin. The venom flowed into her in a dizzying rush. And then a dam broke and she flooded into him, not her thoughts but her body’s complaints, her pain, her exhaustion.
She was alive.She was alive.He could feel her now. He could measure the beats of her heart.
He poured himself into the bond. All his gratitude for her, all his fear of losing her. His regret that he’d left her to labor and bleed alone. His regret that she’d labored and bled forhim, when she could not spare it. His love. Hislove.
Behind him, Betje made a sharp sound of surprise. “It’s working. The bleeding’s tapering off. Whatever you’ve done, it’s working.”
He licked over the wound to help it heal. Kissed it. Was it his imagination, or did her heartbeat strengthen against his lips?
When he finally withdrew, the wound on her neck was already closing, the punctures sealing into crescents of silvery pink. His marks, true mating marks. The bond she’d shared with Drogan had died with him in that ravine, and now Hanna was his.
Hannalinde’s breathing steadied. Her color, the terrible linen-white, began to warm, though she still didn’t open her eyes.
