Bonded to the Blood King

Chapter 4: The Shadow He Assigned Me

Nora’s POV

Apparently, "you don't walk anywhere alone" meant Damien had assigned me a shadow by breakfast.

Her name was Rhea, broad-shouldered, quiet in the way that felt less like shyness and more like someone permanently listening for something the rest of us couldn't hear. She fell into step outside my door the next morning like she'd always been there, and when I asked if she'd been ordered to babysit me, she just said, "Guard," like the correction mattered to her more than it did to me.

"Same thing," I said.

"Not to me."

I decided I liked her more than I wanted to. It made the whole arrangement harder to resent properly.

Rhea walked me to the kitchens, which turned out to be less a kitchen and more an entire operation of humans and something-not-quite-humans moving in practiced rhythm, trays and carafes and the low murmur of people who'd worked together long enough to stop needing full sentences. Nobody stared at me here. That alone made it my favorite room in the whole underground labyrinth so far.

"You're the bonded one," said a woman at the counter, not unkindly, sliding a plate toward me before I'd asked for anything. "Word travels."

"Apparently."

"Eat," she said. "You'll need it. The bond pulls more out of you than you'd think, even before he feeds again."

That stopped me with the fork halfway to my mouth. "Feeds again?"

The woman's face did something careful and diplomatic, the practiced blankness of someone who'd said more than she meant to. Rhea, beside me, didn't offer to fill the silence. Neither of them looked inclined to explain, which told me everything the silence itself couldn't.

I ate. I didn't ask again. But I filed it away with everything else: Silas's mismatched smile, the grey climbing Damien's hands, the thread in my chest that pulled tighter some hours than others, like it kept its own private schedule I hadn't been given the key to.

I found Damien that afternoon in a room I hadn't seen before, not the throne room, something smaller, lined with old ledgers and maps of a city that didn't quite match the Veymoor I knew, streets renamed or vanished entirely. He looked up when I came in like he'd been expecting me, which by now I was starting to suspect meant the bond told him things before I opened my mouth to say them.

"The kitchen staff mentioned you'd need to feed again," I said, skipping past any pretense of small talk. "Feed on what?"

"On you." No hesitation. No cushioning. "Eventually. Not tonight."

"But eventually."

"Yes."

"That's it? Just yes?"

"What would you like me to say instead?"

I didn't have an answer for that, and he didn't wait for one. He went back to the ledger in his hands like the conversation was finished, and something about the sheer economy of it no apology, no explanation, no attempt to make himself more palatable irritated me more than if he'd tried and failed.

"You could have just taken it," I said, to fill the silence more than anything. "That first night. You didn't ask permission then."

He looked up. For one long second I watched something move behind his eyes, not guilt, not exactly- something colder and more controlled, like a door being deliberately shut rather than one that had simply never opened. "No," he said. "I didn't."

"Do you regret it?"

"That's not a question I answer."

"Why not?"

"Because the answer doesn't change anything." He set the ledger down, finally, and studied me the way he had that first night, that terrible, exhausted focus, like a man doing math he didn't enjoy. "You wanted to know if I'll take from you again without asking. I won't. That's the only part of this you need."

It wasn't an apology. It wasn't even close. But it was more of a promise than I'd expected to get out of him, delivered with all the warmth of a man reading terms off a contract, and somehow that made it easier to believe than if he'd tried to make it sound kind.

"I want to see the city," I said instead, because it was easier than examining that feeling too closely. "The real one. Not this—" I gestured at the ledgers, the stone walls, the whole buried world. "I want to see the sky."

Damien studied me for a long moment, like he was weighing something I couldn't see the shape of.

"Tomorrow night," he said. "Rhea will go with you."

"Fine."

"And so will I."

"That wasn't an invitation."

"No," he said. "It wasn't."

He didn't explain further. He didn't offer a reason, didn't try to make it sound like anything other than what it was: a decision made and delivered, no room left in it for negotiation. And yet something in the flat certainty of it, the sheer I am not asking of it, sent a shiver through me that had no business feeling like anything other than fear.

I told myself that's exactly what it was.

I wasn't entirely sure I believed it.