Elara POV:
I jolted awake, my entire body aching with a deep, bone-deep cold.
I was curled into a tight ball on the soft animal furs, my knees pulled tightly to my chest. It was a defensive sleeping posture I had adopted the night I was thrown into the slave camps.
I sat up quickly, my breath misting in the freezing air. The ghostly blue light from the moss illuminated the nightmare around me. Skulls. Femurs. Ribcages. The floor of the massive cavern was a graveyard of every sacrifice thrown down here for the last hundred years. Some of the bones still had dark, dried blood flaking off them.
A heavy, rhythmic breathing sound pulled my attention to the shadows.
Kaelen was awake. His colossal, beastly form was crouched near the entrance of the cavern, his crimson eyes locked onto me with an unblinking stare.
I scrambled backward on the furs until my spine hit the freezing, solid rock wall of the cave. I was trapped.
Seeing me move, Kaelen stood up. The thick metal chains bolted to his wrists and ankles dragged across the stone floor, making a horrible, grating screech as he walked toward me.
I forced my lungs to take a slow, deep breath. Panic would get me killed. My father had spent years teaching me how to read the shifting tides of political courts; I had to apply that same cold calculation to the monster in front of me.
I looked down at my right hand. The jagged cut on my palm had scabbed over during the night. It wasn't a dream. My blood had actually stopped him.
Kaelen stopped right in front of me. He lowered his massive head until his snout was inches from my chest. He aggressively nudged my closed fist with his wet nose, letting out a sharp, frustrated huff of air.
He was looking for it. He wanted the scent. He wanted the blood.
He stepped back and clawed violently at the stone floor. Shards of rock exploded outward. The black, infected veins beneath his scales were pulsing rapidly. The madness virus was clawing its way back into his brain.
I finally understood the dark truth of the labyrinth. The Vora didn't throw men down here just to execute them. They were feeding him. If a royal wasn't fed fresh blood to suppress the virus, he would break the containment wards. I was supposed to be his meal, but my blood was different.
If I didn't give him what he wanted, he was going to tear me apart just to find it.
I locked my jaw. I raised my right hand, dug my thumbnail into the center of the scab, and ripped it open.
Fresh, warm blood immediately welled up and spilled over my palm.
The rich, sweet scent of copper and pheromones hit the air. Kaelen froze instantly. His frantic digging stopped. His crimson eyes snapped to the red droplets sliding down my wrist.
My hand shook violently, but I pushed it forward, offering it to the beast.
A desperate, high-pitched whine tore from his throat. He lunged forward, closing the distance in a millisecond, and pressed his mouth to my hand. His rough, barbed tongue lapped up the blood with frantic greed.
This time, I didn't close my eyes. I forced myself to watch him. I endured the stinging scrape of his tongue and focused on his physical reaction.
It was immediate. The bulging, black veins on his thick neck began to flatten and recede. The rigid tension in his massive shoulders melted away. The blood was acting like a pure, concentrated sedative.
When he had licked my palm entirely clean, he didn't pull away. Instead, he let out a long, heavy sigh and dropped his massive head directly onto my lap.
My whole body went rigid as a board. The sheer weight of his skull pinned my legs to the ground, and the heat radiating from his fur burned through my thin undershirt.
I sat perfectly still for a long moment. Then, slowly, I raised my left hand. I let it hover in the air just above his broad forehead. I waited three seconds. He didn't snap. He didn't growl.
I slowly lowered my hand and pressed my palm flat against the coarse black fur and hard scales between his ears. It was exactly how I used to approach the temperamental, violent warhorses in my family's stables, though this beast could shatter armies.
Kaelen's chest rumbled with a deep, vibrating purr. He closed his crimson eyes and leaned his heavy weight into my touch.
A wild, hysterical laugh bubbled up in the back of my throat. I was sitting in a mass grave, petting the apocalypse.
Suddenly, a sharp, high-pitched mechanical click echoed from the ceiling far above us. Someone had breached the outer ward of the labyrinth.
Kaelen's eyes snapped open. The purr vanished, replaced by a deafening, earth-shaking roar. He vaulted to his feet, placing his massive body entirely between me and the tunnel entrance, his fangs bared at the ceiling.
Cassian POV:
I walked slowly through the shallow, upper corridors of the labyrinth, the pristine white fabric of my coat marking me as one of the three ruling Consuls of the Empire. A stark contrast to the grime of the walls.
I paused, my boots coming to a halt on the metal grating. I frowned.
My enhanced senses caught something riding the updraft from the ventilation shafts. It was incredibly faint, but impossible to ignore.
It was the metallic tang of fresh blood, but woven underneath it was something else. Something breathtakingly sweet. It was the rich, intoxicating scent of a female's pheromones.
I stepped to the edge of the grated floor and looked down into the pitch-black abyss leading to the deepest levels. My heart gave a strange, hard thump against my ribs.
"A scent like this..." I muttered to myself, my voice echoing in the empty corridor, "shouldn't exist in a place of death."
