Chapter Two:
Riven Jones
My team had one job: leave no witnesses.
But of course they messed it up.
They came to me, faces pale, saying the intruder was gone. Impossible. He wouldn't move that fast. The tracks led toward the cliff; anyone who fled that way would have to slow down. So I climbed a tree and waited just far enough from the edge to see without being seen.
Stones whispered down the cliff as he moved. A pale shape in black, melting into the dark. He walked with the kind of reckless ease only royalty dared to carry. When he passed beneath my branch, he froze, like he sensed something wrong.
Good.
I dropped.
Knives in both hands, I landed in a shadow-silent crouch. He recoiled, teeth bared...fangs long, nails like talons. He was fast. Faster than I expected.
We collided.
He punched like a storm and moved like smoke; I answered with steel. My blades whispered, found air, glanced off bone. He hit me with a shoulder that knocked the wind from my lungs. I felt ribs complain. I tasted copper on the back of my tongue.
He wasn't ordinary. Not a rogue. Not a scavenger. There was an arrogance in his strikes, a trained brutality that told me who he was before I could see his face. An heir...dangerous to kill, disastrous to expose.
"Back down!" I spat between breaths. "You don't have to..
"Never." His voice was cold, stubborn. He slammed me to the ground.
My knives skittered away. He planted a boot on my chest, pressing, crushing the air from me. I twisted my hips, grabbed his calf, and pulled...derailing his balance. We toppled, fists and teeth and nails, hands scrambling for purchase on the other's skin.
The world narrowed to impact and instinct. He hit my left chest. Pain flared, hot and bright and something else happened. The crescent scar there burned to life, a thin crescent of red that spread like spilled wine across my skin.
It stole my breath.
My mother's voice an old warning—flashed behind the pain: Only the one meant for you will light the mark your body bears. When it burns, you will know. When it burns, you and that person will be one.
A vampire. My mark. A soulmate. Impossible.
I dragged my gaze up and met his.
For the first time I saw his face clearly: pale skin that drank the moon, eyes the warm brown of old wood. He looked at me like a man seeing the horizon after a long, dark voyage...dazed, mesmerized, as if the world had tilted and nothing made sense.
My heart—traitor—thudded.
"Riven!" a voice cut through...the sharp, familiar call of Rea, my cousin. The brown-eyed vampire blinked, gave me one look as if to memorize me, then vanished into the trees like he had been swallowed by night.
"Riven! Where are you?" Rea called again, closer this time.
"Here." I clutched my chest, the heat of the mark fading. Pain flared where my knives had found me. Rea dropped beside me, breathless, hands already checking my wounds.
"I'm okay," I said before she could pat me off. "Just—get off my chest."
She huffed, fussing with the hem of my shirt. "Thank the gods you're breathing. Who was it? Who's your mate?"
I didn't answer. I pushed myself to my feet, the world still a little tilted. Rea's question lingered like smoke. My feet moved before my head did.
"Riven!" she shouted after me. "Where are you going?"
"Stop." I kept walking. "I need a bath. And a bed." Every muscle throbbed. "I'm tired."
She caught up with me, matching my stride. "Fine. Don't say anything yet. But listen now that the mark's burned, the council will be on your back. The shadows will rise. It best you warn your mate that danger is coming."
My steps stilled. "Warn him? How? He's—" I swallowed. "He's a vampire."
"What? Well that is messed up but it is fate."
"And?" Rea's voice was sharp. "You must also let Aisha go."
The words hit harder than any blow. My body stopped on instinct.
"What?" I asked, stupidly.
"You two are not each other's mates," she said. "So what's the point of holding on? Let her go."
Aisha. My Aisha the one who shared my nights, my plans, the small future we had stitched with whispers. She wasn't my mate. The thought undercut me like a blade. The future we had promised each other...what now? A fantasy torn clean from the spine.
"How," I managed, tongue thick, "do I tell her we dreamed nothing? That our future was a lie? That I'm mated… to a man?"
Rea's face softened for a heartbeat. "You don't tell her like it's a fairytale ending. You protect her. You prepare her. And—" she hesitated—"be honest. It will break her, Riven. It will hurt. But keeping her in a life of lies will be worse."
I laughed then, low and humorless. "What is the goddess doing with my life? I'm straight as a ruler...what cosmic joke has been played on me?"
"You don't get to bargain with fate," Rea said. "You get to survive it. The shadows will help, if you let them. But first...you go home. Clean up. We move before the council hears."
I touched the cooling crescent on my chest and felt the memory of eyes—brown, slow, consuming—burn across my skin. Fate had walked into the forest tonight and spat me out at its feet.
I should have been triumphant. Instead I felt like a man who had found a war where he'd expected a quiet life.
And the war had just begun.