Page 189 of Shifting Hearts 1
“It is,” I told her. I stepped behind her and let my arms settle around her waist, my mouth brushing the curve of her shoulder. “It doesn’t need to protect you anymore. It just needs to stay.”
She leaned back into me, weight relaxed. “Will you?”
“Always.”
That was the last of the old questions. The rest could stay unanswered.
Later, she sat on the floor cross-legged, sorting through a bowl of old fragments she’d once kept hidden — bits of fang and incisor, broken tips of spellwork long buried. She didn’t touch them like weapons now. Just relics. Reminders.
I set one beside her — a smooth wolf's tooth I’d found long ago, back when I thought the only things I had to offer were blood and prophecy. I hadn’t known why I kept it.
But now, sitting beside her, I liked that it had no story. Just a shape I wanted her to have.
She didn’t ask what I meant. Just looked at it. Then at me.
“Always bringing me pieces of yourself,” she said.
“I’ve run out of the sharp ones,” I told her.
Then she rose and disappeared into the washroom. I heard the drawer creak — the one that always caught on its hinges.
When she returned, she was holding something in the palm of her hand. A tooth. Small and pale. Worn smooth at the edges like it had been carried for a long time.
“I never used this one,” she said, voice soft. “It came out when I was ten. I buried it for a while. Dug it back up when I started the bonecraft.”
“What made you keep it?” I asked.
Her shoulders lifted faintly. “It felt like a piece of me I wasn’t ready to give away.”
She set it on the shelf. Not with fanfare. Not with ritual. Just quietly. Deliberately. Like someone closing the cover on an old book.
“No more spells,” she said. “Just remembering.”
“Then let’s remember together,” I murmured, pulling her close, resting my chin on her crown.
We stayed like that — two silhouettes framed by firelight and the low sound of the woods breathing outside.
There would be no legend told of this. No ballads sung. No fate-bound ending.
But she had given me her tooth — not for power, not for prophecy. Just because she wanted to.
And that was enough.
That was everything.
ALSO BY EVER AVARICE
A Song of Wings and Witchery
A Dream of Beasts and Sorcery
A Dance of Blood and Magic
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ever Avarice is a Bestselling Australian Dark Paranormal and Reverse Harem Romance author who loves books and believes there’s magic even in the darkest of places.
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