He studies me for a very long, heartbeat-thick moment, the line of his jaw flexing, the storm behind his eyes churning.
Then he nods.
“I’ll tell you everything,” he says, voice low and raw.
And just like that, the walls begin to fall.
18
DARIUS
Tessa doesn’t break eye contact when I tell her to sit.
She’s curled up in the armchair across from me, her knees pulled in, her hair still damp from the shower, and I can see that flicker in her gaze—the one that says she knows I’ve been holding something back. Something big. Something I’ve carried so long it’s etched into the way I breathe.
The fire’s low, just embers and the occasional spark, but I don’t feed it. I want the dark to press in around us. I want her to feel the weight of what I’m about to say.
“You want to understand me?” I ask quietly. “You want to know why I am the way I am? Then you need to know about the Pact.”
She doesn’t look away. Doesn’t flinch. That’s good.
I lean forward, elbows braced on my knees, as the memories come flooding back.
We thought we were kings. Gods, even. Four shifters from four corners of the world, each of us carrying our own brand of destruction in our veins, standing on the edge of a world that would never accept us if it ever saw us clearly. So we bound ourselves in blood. In secrecy. In solitude.
Not for glory. Not even for power.
For restraint.
Cassian Ward. Rafe Calderon. Malek Thorne. And me. Darius Crane.
We met under a Blood Moon thicker than this one, the air electric with that kind of magic that doesn’t come from ritual—it comes from desperation. I remember the way the wind refused to touch the ground that night. The way the trees leaned in like they wanted to listen. Like they knew something ancient was breaking.
The Ritual Chamber had been empty for centuries before we found it. Hidden beneath the Alaskan range, half-claimed by frost and moss, bones etched into the walls like a warning. We didn’t flinch. We carved our vow into the stone anyway.
No mating, claiming, or shifting outside sanctioned rites. No contact with humans beyond the bare minimum. No betrayal of the Pact, under pain of death.
We thought it would save us. That by locking ourselves away from the world, we’d keep the beast caged too. We didn’t realize the rot was already inside us.
Cassian was the first to falter.
He’d always been the still one. The one who didn’t talk unless you needed to hear something sharp enough to cut through the noise. But after the Arctic massacre—after that village of hunters pushed him too far, after he woke up buried under six feet of snow with blood on his hands and nothing left breathing around him—he vanished. Didn’t say goodbye. Just walked north and never came back.
I still remember the last time I saw him. Kneeling in the snow, staring at his hands like they weren’t his. Like he was already halfway to stone.The bear never forgets, he said.It just waits.
Then Rafe cracked.
He couldn’t live without blood. Not really. Said he was built for war, not restraint. Said pain was the only thing that made him feel real. He kept enforcing Pact law, sure, but it got messier. Sloppier. We buried more than one shifter in silence just to cover his tracks. The final straw was in Brazil. Some jaguar shifter tried to go public—screamed about claiming rights and shifting freedoms. Rafe snapped his spine in front of a crowd and walked away before the body hit the ground.
I tried to call him back. He laughed in my face. Told me I was just another leash pretending to be a brother.You wear silence like a crown, D, but you’re still just a beast trying not to drool.
And then there was Malek.
The lion who made empires rise and fall just to prove a point. He never wanted the Pact for protection. He wanted it for control. And when the vote came—when we had to decide whether to allow the humans into our fold, to reveal just enough to keep from being hunted like myths—he turned on us.
Called it treason. Called me soft. Said if the world feared us, then good.
Cassian refused to come to the summit. Rafe didn’t care. But I? I voted against him.
