Page 42 of Shifting Hearts 1
It starts low, a flicker in my spine, then spreads like wildfire. My skin tingles, my vision sharpens, and the air around me thickens. I gasp, pulling back just enough to look at him, and his eyes widen.
“Raven,” he breathes, voice reverent. “You’re glowing.”
I glance down. My skin shimmers faintly, veins lit with silver and gold. The mark on his shoulder pulses in time with mine, and the chamber responds, sigils flaring, shadows retreating, the stone itself humming with recognition.
It’s happening.
The power I was never supposed to have. The truth they buried. The prophecy they feared.
I feel it rising, not like a weapon, but like a birthright.
Memories I’ve never lived flicker behind my eyes. A woman cloaked in moonlight. A dragon curled around a crescent. A voice whisperingMo Lasairas the world burned and was reborn.
I was cast out. Rejected. Told I was too much, too dangerous, too broken.
But now I know the truth.
I wasn’t meant to be hidden.
I was meant to awaken.
And with Kieran beside me, I finally am.
NINE
Kieran
I’ve seen power before. I’ve wielded it, broken under it, and buried it.
But this—this ishers.
Raven glows like moonfire, her skin laced with light, her breath catching as something ancient unfurls inside her. I hold her tighter, but it’s not protection she needs. It’switness. She’s becoming something the world tried to erase.
And the house knows.
The sigils carved into the stone walls ignite, casting shadows that dance like spirits. The air thickens with memory, blood, betrayal, prophecy. I feel it in my mark, the one that binds me to her. It burns.
The chamber hums with power, but it’s not Raven’s awakening that makes my blood run cold.
It’s the voice.
The Brotherhood’s warning isn’t just a whisper through the walls; it’s a ritual invocation, carved into the bones of this place long before I was born. And it’s directed atme.
“The Echo has awakened. The seal is broken. The exile ends.”
“She is not yours to claim.”
“She is the reckoning.”
I clench my jaw, the words slicing through me like blades. I know that voice. I helped write those laws. I enforced them, I led them.
I am the Alpha of the Forsaken Brotherhood, and I just broke our oldest commandment.
Raven stiffens in my arms. Her eyes, still glowing, meet mine, and I see it; fear, yes, but also defiance. The kind that doesn’t beg for mercy. The kind thatremembers.She doesn’t know what this means. Not fully. Not yet.
But I do.
The Brotherhood will come. Not to question me. Not to strip my title.
