His entire body went still. His hands curled into fists at his sides, his chest expanded with a breath that seemed to rattle through him.
I swallowed.Hard.
“Ky!” Thessa waved enthusiastically beside me. “Over here!”
The man didn’t look at her or acknowledge her wave. Hell, he didn’t seem to hear her voice at all. His entire being was focused on me with an intensity that made my skin prickle. Not with fear, not exactly. I didn’t know what it was.
He moved toward me. Not walked.Moved.Each step deliberate, predatory, unstoppable.
And then his eyes changed.
I blinked. For a split second, I could have sworn his gray eyes shifted, glowing amber in the bookstore lighting.
Inhuman.
No. That was insane. Eyes didn’t do that. I’d been writing too many werewolf books and my brain had finally broken. But he was still coming, staring, and there was a sound building in his chest, low and rumbling.
Almost like a growl.
He stopped in front of my table and towered over me. His breathing was ragged, his jaw was clenched and he was looking at me in a way that no one had ever looked at me before.
“Mate.”
The word ripped out of him, guttural, dragged from a place that was deep and ancient.
I froze.
What the actual fuck?
2
— • —
Caelan
“Ky. Ky. Caelan. Brother. Light of my life. Are you listening to me?”
I was not listening to her.
I was scanning the street for magical fluctuations, trying to pinpoint the source of the portal instability that had brought us to this mountain town in the first place. Three weeks ago, a new portal opened in Duskmere, unstable and unpredictable, its magical signature spiking in ways that concerned the royal council. My father, King Mortimer Goldridge, had sent me to this human world to investigate.
Me. Crown Prince of Duskmere. Heir to one of the greatest thrones of Lytopia. Chasing magical anomalies through the human realm like a glorified errand boy.
“You’re brooding again,” Thessa said, skipping beside me. “You have your brooding face on. The one that makes you look constipated.”
“I don’t have a brooding face.”
“You absolutely have a brooding face. It’s your default setting. Mother says you came out of the womb brooding.”
“Mother would never say that.”
“She said it to me last week. She also said you need to ‘loosen up’ and ‘find joy in the little things’ and ‘stop acting like the weight of seven allied kingdoms rests on your shoulders.’”
“It does rest on my shoulders. I’m the Crown Prince.”
“You’re the Crown Prince ofonekingdom. The other six have their own heirs. You’re not that special.”
I loved my sister. I truly did. But some days, I understood why our brother Pattryk locked himself in his study and refused to speak to anyone for hours at a time.
