PROLOGUE
The Past
Nix watched as the life faded from her fated mate’s eyes. He was the only man who knew her, down to her bones. The only man who would try to protect her from their torturer.
After being trapped for years in cages because of their rare shifter species, how was she supposed to go on without him?
Nix screamed and cried as she watched Persius bleed out, this time for the last time. She reached out from her cage, trying to touch his hand through his identical metal prison. “Please don’t leave me,” she begged him. “I love you. Please don’t leave me here alone.”
Alone with…him. The sick and twisted monster who tortured and performed experiments on Nix and Persius.
The last experiment had gone too far.
Persius coughed a small, splattered pool of blood. A crack sounded in his arm as he pushed with the last of his energy to move his now broken arm between two bars to reach her.
Persius and Nix’s fingers grazed each other’s. It was the most “touch” the two caged shifters had been able to revel in, afterhaving only known each other when they awoke in cages two years ago.
“I wanted to protect you,” Nix cried. “I can get us out of here, I promise. Just hold on. I just need more time.”
Persius smiled sadly at her, blood dripping from his beautiful bow-shaped lips. With his last breath, he told her, “Find me in the next life, my love.”
CHAPTER 1
When Nix had originally woken up, six years in her past, she had marveled at the chance to find Persius and change both of their fates—before they were ever captured.
Back at the academy, a year and a half before graduation.
Nix believed the strange, unheard of time traveling she experienced stemmed from a gods-gifted chance at revenge and at love. With Persius.
Elle, a woman Nix might have described as her best friend—her adoptive sister—in the past, had magically enchanted Persius to sleep with her.
Elle had enchanted Persiusnotto recognize Nix as his mate in this second chance at life.
After having bragged about sleeping with Persius, Elle had paled when she saw Nix’s wrathful gaze. “Uh, Nix, your—your eyes…”
The sound of Elle’s delicate wrist bones snapped under Nix’s tight, crazed grip.
It did not make sense. Nix had never been strong. She had never displayed any powerful shifter traits like her peers. No super strength; no super speed. Nix had never even been able to shift and figure outwhatshe was.
But Elle’s wrist snapped like a thin potato chip in Nix’s hand.
Elle shrieked in pain from her broken wrist and tried to tug it away from Nix, but Nix did not let go.
Nix’s gaze fogged over with a haze of violent red as she yelled, “What did you do to him?”
Persius. Her mate. Elle had controlled him with an enchantment andfuckedNix’s fated mate.
I want to break all of her, Nix thought viciously.
“Oh gods,” Elle cried out in fear as she trembled. “Let me go! Nix, your eyes!”
Nix screamed at her, “What did you do to him—to me? WHAT DID YOU DO?”
“My wrist,” Elle shrieked. “Nix…you’re sick. I can see it in y-your eyes. You’re not feeling well. Do you want me to give you your…medicine?”
For years, Elle and her family—the Oadess clan, who had taken Nix in at the age of ten when her parents went missing—had given Nix an elixir. She used to think it was just an illusion potion given to Nix to help her “fit in” with the other swan shifters of the clan. To lessen the “Ugly Duckling” bullying that Nix experienced.
But Nix had realized that the same elixir the Oadess family had given her over the past ten years contained shifter poison, called Evernell, which had weakened Nix every day. Preventing her from shifting. Preventing her from getting strong.
