Page 35 of Roar Me Like You Mean It
“Yes.”
“And Darius?”
The name grates like broken glass. I lift my gaze to meet his, unflinching. “I’ll answer him. But not as his soldier. Not even as his brother. On my terms.”
Michaelis studies me, searching for cracks, for hesitation. He’ll find none. At last he nods, though his jaw tightens. He knows as well as I do that once the call is answered, there is no middle ground. War doesn’t care about terms.
When he leaves, the room feels heavier, the silence thicker. I sit at the desk and turn the coin over in my hand, its weight an anchor dragging me back through centuries.
Cassian’s stillness. Rafe’s laughter. Darius’ scowl. Roman’s fire.
The brotherhood we built on blood and vows lies shattered, pieces scattered across the world. I told myself I didn’t miss them. But the truth burns. I miss what we were, before ambition twisted us, before Roman betrayed us.
I press the coin to the map where his name coils like a stain and whisper, voice low, meant for him alone.
“Not yet. But soon.”
The message is sent through channels Roman cannot ignore. Not an email, not a call, but something older. A Syndicate safehouse in Istanbul, its walls still marked with scars from the last war, receives an envelope. Inside, nothing but Cassian’s coin and the words I carved into parchment myself:Not yet.
He will know it’s me. He will know I’m watching.
And he will know I’m coming.
By the time the sun claws its way fully above the horizon, the city outside my windows has already sprung to life. Trains rumble, horns blare, children shout on their way to schools. The illusion of peace stretches across Geneva, and none of them see the fault lines forming beneath their feet.
I pour the whiskey at last, the glass heavy, the liquid amber catching the light like fire. I lift it, not as a toast, but as a vow.
“To Roman,” I murmur, my voice thick with the lion’s growl. “Enjoy your empire while it lasts. Because when I come for you, it won’t be whispers. It won’t be shadows. It will be fire.”
I drink, the burn sliding down like molten iron, and at last I feel alive again. Not as the man who hid in boardrooms, not as the king who buried his oath, but as the lion who remembers what it means to claim.
And this time, I will not be alone.
24
JENNIFER
The day drags like an anchor. Every hour feels stretched thin, as though the air itself is waiting for something to break. My body is tired, but my mind won’t stop working. After Malek left me shaken on the couch, I thought maybe I’d sleep, maybe I’d let myself collapse and shut my eyes until morning. Instead, I spent half the night pacing and the other half combing through every scrap of information I could find that might explain what the hell is happening to me.
Just after dawn, a single name appears on the ancestry records I’ve been digging through, like a thread tugged loose from the tapestry of my bloodline.
Morrigan Callahan.
I never heard of her. My father never mentioned her, my mother—God rest her—never hinted. But the record is there, buried in faded parish documents from the mid-1800s, where the name Callahan first appears tied to a woman who vanished without explanation. What matters isn’t the disappearance. It’s the notes scrawled beside her baptismal record in an archivist’s cramped hand.
“Witchcraft whispered. Exiled.”
The words are centuries old, but they land on me like a hammer.
I scroll faster, pulling more records, chasing the threads. The deeper I dig, the clearer it becomes. Morrigan wasn’t just some poor woman accused of spells in a time when superstition ruled. There are repeated mentions of her in documents tied to covens—real covens, not Salem hysteria. There are references to pacts with “shifting men,” references to battles fought at the edges of forgotten towns, and to bloodlines that bound witches and shifters together for strength.
And then there’s nothing. The record cuts off. No more coven or witches. Just silence, as though someone scrubbed her and everything tied to her from the page of history.
The hairs on my arms lift as I lean back in my chair. My laptop hums faintly in the quiet, the radiator ticking as it releases another groan of steam into the apartment. Outside, the city is alive—horns, sirens, voices rising as the world goes on. But in here, it feels like the past has wrapped its fingers around my throat.
I whisper her name once, softly. Morrigan.
It fits in my mouth too easily.
