A single beat.
Then the Shadow King bit her back, and all hell broke out.
DECLAN
There was an order to these things.
Rituals to follow.
Ceremony. Vows. Process.
And my bear gave not one single fuck.
He roared inside me, lunging forward, maw-first.
SADIE
The Shadow King flooded into me. All his memories. All his serenity. All his moon knowledge.
He’d been born this way. Quiet as the moon. Utterly without the desire to speak.
A human psychiatrist once tried to label it. And that diagnosis had been the very thing that made him come out—as someone completely unwilling to talk.
It hurt him to speak. Like knives scraping his chest.
But he loved me. Loved me so much. He’d do anything to protect me. To keep me safe.
Including biting me back. So our telekinetic link would be established. So I’d never be without his words again.
But there were only three words in his head when I made my mark on his neck:“I love you. I love you. I love you.”
Over and over again.
A hard-coded script, running on an infinite loop. Installed the moment our eyes locked across the dining room. When my strawberry scent first triggered his internal recognition protocol.
And I’d mistaken him for Death.
For a moment, we were the only two objects in the universe.
Which I understood now, down to the calculations and theories. Including The Big Laptop. A story theory he’d developed to explain our existence: What he believed to be a written version of reality. He believed in the bears’ three serpent gods. But he also believed we were little more than story. One that may or may not have a happy ending.
I stared at all his knowledge in wonder, giving him the little I had in return.
And then something else crashed into me.
TADHG
The High King’s teeth sank into the space on the other side of Sadie’s neck at the same time his hips plunged into her strawberry wet.
DECLAN
I drove into her like something possessed. Biting viciously into her, in the same way she’d taken the Shadow King.
Then I drowned in the knowledge of her.
Her mind had been conditioned to be simple.
But it was also a Rubik’s Cube of ever-shifting wants and needs and instincts she didn’t understand.
