BLOOD BEFORE THE BOND

CHAPTER 4

Liora's POV

I saw Elder Mauve before I fully registered anything else in the room.

She was seated beside the head lady's desk, hands folded in her lap, expression arranged into something that looked almost like concern if you didn't know better. My stomach dropped before anyone said a word. Elder Mauve did not come to the breeder's quarters for routine matters. She came when she wanted to make sure something was done properly.

I sat down in the chair across from the desk and made myself breathe evenly.

“You're aware of why you're her.” The head lady said, folding her hands on top of a folder I couldn't read from where I was sitting.

“I assume you're about to tell me,” I said.

Elder Mauve's expression tightened slightly at my tone. She didn't speak yet. She was letting the head lady run this part.

"You've been assigned to bear a child,” the head lady said, with the same flat delivery she might use to hand out laundry rotations. “The arrangement has already been approved.”

The floor seemed to tilt slightly beneath my feet.

“For who?” I asked. My voice came out quieter than I intended.

She said the name.

I knew it. Everyone in the quarters knew it, the way you knew the names of things you tried very hard to stay away from. He was spoken about in low voices and sideways glances, a man whose temper had already left more than one woman in this place permanently changed. Not changed in ways that healed cleanly. Changed in the way that showed up in how someone moved through a room afterward, careful and contracted, like they were still waiting for the next blow.

“No.”I said.

“Liora.”

“No.” I said it more clearly the second time, sitting up straighter. “I won't. I've been on cleaning rotation my entire time here. I've never been assigned to anyone. Why now? Why him specifically?”

Years. I had spent years in this place doing exactly that scrubbing floors, washing linens, making myself useful in every way that kept me out of the assignment lists. The only man I had ever been with was Kaius, back when I believed I had left all of this behind permanently. The idea that I had ended up back here was already unbearable. The idea that I was being handed to someone like that was something else entirely.

“This isn't a request," Elder Mauve said. Her voice had dropped to the temperature it got when she was done being polite. "You've caused enough disruption. Consider this part of settling back into your appropriate place."

"My appropriate place," l repeated. “You mean a punishment."

“I mean a correction," she said. “You are no longer a guest in the main house, Liora. You are back where you started, and it is past time you remembered what that actually means."

I turned to the head lady, because Elder Mauve was clearly not the one I was going to reach. "I won't do it," l said again, hating that my voice was starting to shake. “You cannot make me do this."

The head lady looked at me with something that might have been genuine regret if it had been attached to any intention of helping me. “The arrangement has been finalized,” she said. “There's nothing left to discuss.”

I sat there for a moment, running through every argument I had, every angle, every possible piece of leverage, and finding nothing. Nothing that would change what had already been decided in this room before I even walked into it.

"You may go,” Elder Mauve said in the way you dismiss someone you have already stopped thinking about.

I stood up. My legs moved on their own, carrying me out the door and into the hallway before my mind fully caught up with what had just happened. The door clicked shut behind me and I stood in the corridor for a moment, pressing one hand flat against the wall, breathing through the tightness in my chest.

I made it halfway back down the hallway before the tears came. Hot and fast, blurring the edges of everything. I pressed forward anyway, keeping my feet moving, because standing still in a hallway crying was not something I was willing to give anyone here the satisfaction of seeing.

Wren was up the moment I walked through the door.

She didn't ask questions first. She just pulled me down to sit beside her on the bed and let me fall apart for a few minutes before she asked anything at all. I told her everything in pieces, my voice breaking apart and reassembling itself badly between sentences. She listened without interrupting, her hand steady on my back the whole time.

When I finished, she was quiet for a long moment.

“I don't want to do this," l said, wiping my face with the back of my hand. “I can't do this, Wren.”

“I know," she said softly. "But you know how it works here once it's been approved.”

“There has to be a way out.”

She looked at me carefully. “Liora. You've seen what happens to the girls who refuse.”

I had. I had seen exactly what happened, and none of it was something I could let happen to myself. The women who refused didn't win. They just lost differently, and more painfully, and with fewer options left afterward.

“So I just accept it?” I asked. The words tasted like ash.

Wren didn't answer. Her silence was its own answer.

I lay back on the narrow bed and stared at the cracked ceiling while she eventually drifted off beside me, her breathing evening out into sleep. The room was cold and dark and exactly as small as I remembered it.

I pressed my hand flat against my stomach in the dark, the way I had been doing more and more without meaning to.

The missed cycles. The tenderness. The way certain smells turned my stomach in the mornings. I had been pushing it to the back of my mind since the night the glass shattered at my feet, telling myself I would deal with it when things settled.

Things were not going to settle.

If I was carrying Kaius's child and Elder Mauve found out before I figured out what to do about it she would own that too. She would turn it into another arrangement, another tool, another piece moved where it was most useful to her.

I was not going to let that happen.

I stared at the ceiling and I thought, and I thought, and somewhere in the thinking a shape began to form. Small and fragile and not fully formed yet, but there.

There was one person in that main house who was just as trapped as I was.

And tomorrow I was going to find a way to reach her.