Page 173 of Shifting Hearts 1
He said nothing.
I saw the twitch in his jaw. The way his hands clenched and unclenched. He didn’t know what to do with me—with us. But fate did. And it was tightening the knot. Trying to strangle us both if we let it.
“I tried to throw it away,” I whispered. “The tooth. I buried it, burned it, drowned it. I stitched it into the belly of a crow and set it loose. Still, it came back to me.”
Brannon shook his head, took a step back. “This isn’t real. It can’t be. I lost that tooth in a dream. It was nothing.”
“Then why does it burn you?”
We both looked at the fang on the forest floor, glowing faintly like a piece of coal banked under ash. I didn’t dare touch it again. Afraid I’d get burned again — or worse wind up dead for my trouble.
Instead, I turned my focus inward. My dreambone necklace lay heavy against my throat, and the fang now hung from its centre, fused somehow with my own milk teeth. As if it belonged there. As if it had always been there.
The magic inside me stirred. Old, bone-bound, and blood-sworn. And that was when I felt it — not just the mate-thread thrumming between us, but something darker. Deeper. A memory surfaced, slick and unwelcome, from my time in the dark court.
An oath made in blood and bone.
“I swore to kill you,” I breathed, stunned. “Years ago.”
Brannon froze. “What?”
“I didn’t know it was you then. I didn’t even know your name. Just a face in the bone-fire. The fey made me bind it. A death-oath. You were just… a future. A possibility. And now you’re standing in front of me.”
“You’re saying you were sent to kill me?” His voice was a low growl, more beast than man.
“No,” I said. “Worse. I was trained to. They prepared me for it. I dreamt of your death, countless times. The dark court doesn’t waste their magic on soft endings.”
His hands rose, claws not quite formed but itching beneath his skin. I could feel the Wyrd crawling across his bones like lightning before a storm.
“I should end this now,” he said.
“Then do it,” I spat. “Spare us both.”
He didn’t move, and neither did I.
Instead, we stared at each other—two predators caught in the same trap, fangs bared, hearts pounding, the Wyrd unravelling around us like a broken spool of thread.
“Why haven’t you already?” I whispered.
He blinked.
That single second—that flicker of hesitation—was everything. It told me he wasn’t sure. That something in him didn’t want to hurt me, not yet. Not now. The mate bond might have sickened him, might have filled him with dread and rage, but it still worked. Still curled its fingers into our spines and whispered,mine, mine, mine.
“I can’t,” he said finally, and the fury dropped from his shoulders like a weight he could no longer carry anymore.
Neither one of us moved toward the other. We couldn’t. The magic made sure of that.
But the Wyrd howled between us, louder than any words, and that howl would follow us both into the dark.
So, I turned away from him first, and he didn’t try to stop me.
FOUR
Brannan
Ishould’ve killed her the moment she said my name.
Eris. The name tasted like poison in my mouth, all sweetness and rot. She was a slip of bone and shadow, the kind of beautiful that made men die stupid deaths. And I wasn’t immune. Ifeltit — the pull of fate like a scythe behind my ribs, a promise soaked in blood and sealed in ash.
