She reaches for me.
I reach for her.
In the moment before the King can react, before its soldiers can close in, before the Veil can tear any wider—our hands connect. Her fingers lace through mine, small and cold but gripping with a strength that belies her size. The marks on our skin flare in unison, calling to each other across the distance that tried to separate us.
The King roars with a thousand voices. Its soldiers surge forward, a tide of rusted armor and rotting flesh. The battlefield itself shifts, trenches opening beneath our feet, the ground trying to swallow us whole.
But I’m already moving.
I pull Aradya against my armored torso with one arm, my other hand finding the mark on her collarbone. The brand burns beneath my palm—her mark, the one I gave her in the prison, the one that ties her to me across any distance.
“Drokhar—”
“Trust me.”
I press my palm harder against her mark and speak the words of claiming.
Not the initial words—those were spoken in the prison, when the mating bond first awakened between us. These are different. Older. The words that complete a claiming, that seal a bond so thoroughly it becomes unbreakable. Ancient orc magic, predating the wars that tore the Veillands apart, predating even the betrayal that shattered the Veil.
The words my father taught me when I was a boy, when the mark first manifested and I didn’t understand what it meant. I was nineteen. Terrified. Certain that no woman would ever want a man whose future was already written in blood and ash. My father told me to keep the words anyway, to hold them in my heart until the day I found someone worth claiming.
I never thought I’d use them.
I never thought I’d find someone worth claiming.
Until her.
Until a mourning witch who speaks for the dead looked at me—the man who silences them—and saw a man worth saving.
THIRTY-THREE
DROKHAR
The mark sears into her skin like a brand.
She gasps—pain and pleasure and recognition all at once. The light pouring from her collarbone intensifies, matching the light blazing from my sternum, the two marks burning so bright they cast shadows across the entire battlefield.
The pain is immediate. Overwhelming. I feel it in my own flesh, the mark on my sternum burning hotter than any pyre I’ve ever lit, hot enough to scar me from the inside out. We’re branded. Both of us. Marked so deeply that the claim reaches beyond skin and bone into our very souls.
The King screams.
A thousand voices raised in fury, shaking the blood-red sky, making the corpses on the battlefield collapse and the waiting soldiers scatter. It reaches for us with hands made of fused bodies, trying to tear us apart, to break the claim before it can complete?—
But it’s too late.
The mating mark isn’t a bond in the way the King understands bonds. It’s not a chain or a leash or a cage. It’s an anchor—and not the kind the King wanted.
It’s an anchor to the living world.
A tie so powerful that not even the Gravetide King can break it.
The battlefield shudders. The Veil—already thin, already strained from the King pulling Aradya through—tears wider. I can see through the cracks: glimpses of stone and darkness, the depths beneath Blackreach, the passage we used to descend.
I pull Aradya toward the nearest tear.
She clings to me, her power still pouring off her in waves, her whispered commands forcing the King’s soldiers back whenever they get too close. The mark tells me she’s exhausted—not her emotions, but her presence, flickering like a candle in a storm.
“Almost there.” I don’t know if I’m saying it for her benefit or mine. “Almost?—”