Page 36 of Roar Me Like You Mean It
I keep digging, chasing her through the cracks of old documents, folklore studies, forgotten church ledgers. Patterns start to form, fragments knitting together like broken glass pieced into a window. The covens were not separate from the shifters. They worked together. Witches bound spells into steel, strengthened claw and tooth with charms, healed wounds too deep for mortal medicine. Shifters protected them, carried their fire into battle, stood shield at their side.
Together, they were unstoppable.
And that was the problem.
The split didn’t happen naturally. It was manufactured. I find fragments—letters, half-translated journals, warnings scribbledin margins. Dark forces, old as any of the covens, seeded distrust. Rumors of betrayal, whispers of curses cast by witches, of shifters turning wild under their control. It was all designed to fracture the bond. To make sure the two sides would never stand together again.
It worked. Covens burned. Shifters turned on witches. Witches turned on shifters. Alliances shattered.
And Roman is trying to stitch it all back together, but not as it was. Not as strength and balance. He wants an empire built on chains, with women like me shackled and drained, their power siphoned to fuel his armies.
I grip the edge of the desk until my knuckles whiten. The memory of the vision claws at me again: the throne, the chains, the rivers of blood. My body trembles, but not with fear this time. With fury.
It doesn’t have to be the future.
That’s what hits me hardest, sharp as glass. The vision didn’t feel like destiny. It felt like a path, one of many. A warning, not a promise. And warnings can be changed.
I push up from the chair, pacing the apartment with sharp steps. My bare feet slap against the wood floor, my mind spinning. Pieces click into place. Morrigan wasn’t just some distant name lost in parish records. She was proof. Proof that the blood in me carries more than stubbornness and a talent for fighting men twice my size in court. Proof that my visions aren’t madness or stress. Proof that witches and shifters are stronger together—and that someone has been working for centuries to make sure we never figure it out.
The air in the apartment feels charged, hot against my skin, though the radiator has gone quiet. My pulse pounds in my ears, my chest tight. I press a hand to the counter and try to steady myself, but the moment my palm hits the wood, the same heat that burned through me when I touched Malek’s relic sparksagain. My vision blurs. For a heartbeat, I think I’m about to collapse.
Instead, a flicker of images burns across my mind. Not fire and chains this time, but a circle of women standing in a clearing, their hands linked, their voices lifted in song. A lion prowls behind them, golden eyes bright, his presence not as a master but as a guard. Their voices rise, weaving into a shield of light, and for a moment I feel it—the raw strength of what once was.
It fades quickly, leaving me breathless, clutching the counter, my knees weak. But the impression lingers. This is not over. Roman’s empire is not the only path.
I can almost hear Morrigan’s voice whispering through the crack of history.We were stronger together.
By late afternoon, the apartment looks like a crime scene of research. Books I dragged from the law library’s dusty basement are spread across the table. Photocopies of journals, highlighted passages from obscure folklore anthologies, scribbled notes from cracked forums online where conspiracy theorists spin tales that sound too close to the truth to be ignored.
I barely notice the sun sinking behind the skyline, the gold light spilling across my walls, catching on the glass of the picture frame still sitting where I left it—my parents’ faces frozen in a world that seems impossibly small now. I wonder if they knew. If my mother whispered stories she never told me. If my father buried them because they were too dangerous to remember.
I press the heel of my hand to my forehead, the weight of it all pressing down.
Roman is building chains. Malek is gathering shifters. And me—I’m sitting in a one-bedroom apartment with witch blood in my veins, research scattered like breadcrumbs, and the knowledge that if I don’t find a way to change the ending, the vision I saw could devour us all.
But I refuse to be a prophecy’s pawn.
If the witches were burned once, if shifters were broken, then maybe it’s on me to piece the bond back together. Maybe Morrigan’s blood didn’t vanish. Maybe it’s here in me for a reason.
I whisper the words into the dimming light, a vow I don’t fully understand but know I mean.
“It won’t be his future. Not while I breathe.”
The words settle heavy in the room, and I feel something like clarity. Not peace, not hope—those are luxuries. But clarity. A blade honed sharp enough to cut.
I don’t know how to wield it. But I will.
25
MALEK
The night is quiet in Geneva, but not the kind of quiet that soothes. It’s the heavy stillness that comes before a storm, the silence that makes the air taste of iron and change. I sit in my study, the fire snapping low, my hand curled tight around the seal that has never left me.
The coin’s edges press into my palm, worn smooth from centuries of touch, yet still sharp enough to remind me what it is. A bond sign. A mark of trust. The only thing I’ve never given away, not even when my brothers were still alive and our Pact was unbroken.
It shouldn’t be hers. Every instinct I’ve sharpened across a lifetime of war screams that this will bind me, tether me in a way I’ve avoided since Cassian pressed the first oath into my blood. But her face lingers in my mind, eyes wide as she collapsed into my arms, her breath catching as she whispered Roman’s name, the way her body softened when she trusted me to hold her through it. The bond has already started, no matter how much I fight it.
I told myself she was dangerous. That she’d unravel everything. And she has. But not in the way I feared. She isn’t weakness. She’s fire.
