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The morning sunlight cutting through the stained-glass freezes. The air turns sub-zero in a heartbeat, cold enough that my breath plumes white between us. The chill doesn't come from the room; it rips straight up from the bedrock beneath the foundations, tearing through the soles of our shoes and sinking into our marrow.
Beside me, Vivienne gasps.
Her fingers clamp down on mine with desperate, white-knuckled strength. The skin beneath her collarbone pulls tight, her pulse hammering against her jugular like a trapped bird. I plant my boots wide, dropping my center of gravity, bracing myself like I'm standing in front of an avalanche.
My bear rises instantly, claws digging into the floorboards of my mind, ears pinned flat. He knows what’s coming.
"Say the words, Viv," I urge her, my voice gravelly against the rising hum in the floorboards.
She glares into the empty black mouth of the fireplace, squaring her jaw. She looks tiny next to me—a fragile mortal girl in sneakers—and yet she carries herself like she’s about to put an entire empire in a chokehold.
"In umbra veritas," she says.
Her voice isn't loud, but it strikes the stone like an iron chisel.
The slate beneath our boots shudders. Deep below the floor, ancient machinery groans—massive counterweights and sleeping leylines shifting after two centuries of rot. The blue smoke at her wrist doesn't drift anymore. No, the magic whips around her forearm like a miniature tempest.
"In cinere vita," she finishes, her chin snapping high.
The hearth explodes.
A roaring, vertical torrent of pure, liquid night, shot through with blinding diamond-white starlight. A pillar of absolute void shrieking up the chimney flue, so cold it burns.
The backlash hits her like a physical hammer.
Vivienne’s head jerks back, a scream caught in her throat as her eyes roll, whites showing in the darkness of the black flames. Her knees buckle. The unmaking tears into her, an ocean trying to force its way through a straw, threatening to blow every blood vessel in her brain to pieces.
Not my mate.
"I've got you," I roar.
I haul her sideways into my chest, wrapping my free arm around her ribs, locking our joined wrists against my sternum.
The magic slams into me.
Pain rips down my arm, tearing through muscle and cartilage. My head snaps back, a sound tearing out of my throat, the bear threatening to take over—half-man, half-beast, we loose a roar that rattles the crystal in the chandeliers thirty feet above us.
My boots slide back an inch, grinding against the stone.
The magic wants to rip us apart. It wants to shatter us. But shifters are made of ancient Highland earth magic. We don't break under the sky; we meet it on the horizon.
I sink the magic. I drive every screaming volt of her unmaking straight through my legs, down into the foundation of the house, letting the earth swallow what her mortal veins couldn't carry. The gold fire of my clan's bond roars to life, blazing white-hot, wrapping around her blue smoke and bending it, forcing the wild current into a clean loop between our beating hearts.
The house shudders in response—a concussive tremor that rolls through the estate.
And then, just as quickly as it came, the roar cuts out.
The gale collapses inward, sucked straight into the grate.
The black fire settles into the stone. Instead of a domestic hearth fire, it’s made of velvet shadows and crackling starlight, throwing off a radiant warmth that smells of ozone.
Vivienne's dead weight drops into my arms.
I hit both knees on the slate, catching her against my chest before she can hit the stone. My lungs heave, dragging in cold air, my heart hammering so violently against my ribs I can barely hear the quiet crackle of the flames.
"Vivienne," I choke out, my hands shaking as I push the wild hair back from her forehead. "Viv, look at me."
I scan her face, my stomach twisting into cold knots, dread clawing up my throat. I look for the crimson trickling from her nostrils. I look for the burst capillaries in her eyes, the fever-sweat of an heir whose blood is boiling in their veins.
