Page 38 of Shifting Hearts 1
The vision shifts.
We’re on a battlefield scorched by dragonfire. Raven stands at the center, cloaked in shadow, her eyes blazing. Bodies fall around her, some human, some monstrous. She screams, and the sound becomes a spell, a curse, a promise. Then the scene fractures again.
A ruined temple. A child with Raven’s eyes reaches for a blade etched with the Brotherhood’s sigil. I’m kneeling before her, bleeding, offering the weapon like a sacred gift. I remember this moment. I’ve dreamed it. Feared it. The voice returns, colder now.
“If you love her, you will burn.”
Raven trembles beside me. “Is this our future?” she asks, voice barely audible.
I shake my head, eyes locked on hers. “It’safuture,” I say, and the weight of it presses down on me like ash.
She doesn’t flinch. “Then we change it.”
The vision begins to collapse, the chamber calling us back, but before it fades, one final image sears itself into my mind; a crown of bone, a kiss in fire, and the two of us bound, broken, beloved, standing at the edge of the world.
We snap back into the chamber like surfacing from deep water. Gasping, disoriented, changed. The vision still echoes in my blood, but it’s her I feel most.Raven.Her presence is a roar in my senses now, no longer distant or uncertain. The bond is locked into place. There’s no going back.
She stands in the center of the room, chest rising and falling, eyes wide and luminous. Power clings to her skin like heat. I move before I can think, drawn to her like gravity. My hands rise, slow and deliberate, and I brace them on either side of her face. I give her time to pull away. I need her to choose this.
She doesn’t move.
Her breath brushes my lips. Her gaze holds mine, steady and unflinching.
“My fated mate,” I whisper, voice rough with everything I’ve held back. “My flame.”
Then I kiss her.
Hard.
It’s not gentle. It’s not careful. It’s the kind of kiss that burns through centuries of silence, prophecy, and war. Her hands clutch my shirt, pulling me closer, and I feel the bond flare again. Not just magic, but memory, longing, recognition. Like we’ve done this before in a hundred lifetimes and still never got it right.
She tastes like frost and fire. Like defiance. Likehome.
And for the first time in years, I stop fighting the curse.
I let it claim me.
I letherclaim me.
Her lips are still on mine when the fire shifts.
Not the one between us, the one in the house. In the wards. In the bloodlines stitched into the stone beneath our feet.
The bond is sealed. I feel it in my bones, in the mark on my shoulder, in the way the house exhales like it’s been holding its breath for centuries. Raven is mine now. Not by ritual, not by choice. By fate.
And fate doesn’t come quietly.
I pull back just enough to see her face, flushed and fierce, her eyes still glowing faintly with the power that answered mine. She’s beautiful like this—untamed, awakened, dangerous.
But the moment is already slipping.
“They’ll come for us,” I say, voice low, rough. “The Brotherhood.”
Her brow furrows. “Why?”
“Because the bond changes everything.” I step back, just enough to let the truth settle between us. “They don’t fear love. They fear what love unlocks, what it unleashes.”
She’s silent, but I see the question in her eyes.
