Chapter 3

"She's more than just your fated mate. She's Raven. Or at least a part of Raven."

The corridor was stone and torchlight and shadow, and in it Declan Thorne stood very still. The kind of still that only a man who has lived for two thousand years can achieve — the stillness of someone whose body has learned to stop moving when the mind needs all available resources.

He nodded.

The moment I touched her, I felt something more than just her."

Nyima looked at him with those amethyst eyes, and in them was something that might have been compassion, or might have been the particular sadness of a woman who has lived long enough to watch the same tragedies repeat themselves in new skins.

"It's not surprising that whatever vision she had happened as she was demanding escape," Nyima said. "That piece of Raven doesn't want to leave you."

Viktor leaned against the corridor wall. His arms were crossed. His face was the face of a man doing calculations he didn't like the answers to.

"So we're talking past lives here? Wren is Raven returned?"

"No. Not exactly." Nyima paused, choosing her words with the precision of someone who understood that words, like spells, could not be taken back once spoken. "More like remnants of Raven. I'll need to find a way to explore this girl's lineage. Or that of her friend." She looked at Declan. "Marie Laveau was a powerful voodoo queen. I'm wondering if maybe there was a reincarnation spell done that went wrong."

"Wrong how?" Declan asked.

"Well — Wren is clearly Wren. But some part of her is also Raven. Yet Wren, not Raven, is your fated mate. I also don't think that particular detail is unconnected to her being brought here."

The words landed in the corridor like stones dropped into still water. The ripples spread outward, touching everything.

Declan and Viktor looked at each other. The same look they had shared in the marketplace when Wren said *New Orleans*. The look that carried an entire conversation in a single glance.

If the reincarnation spell was connected to Wren's abduction — if the magic that had placed Raven's remnants inside this girl was the same thread that had led Cassius to find her — then this was not a simple breach of the Covenant.

This was something older. Something that had been set in motion centuries ago, moving through time like a current beneath the surface, invisible until the moment it pulled you under.

Viktor spoke first. "If this spell is connected to her abduction, things are about to get very messy."

Declan said nothing. He turned and looked at the closed door behind which his mate — his impossible, furious, broken, magnificent mate — was lying in a bed in his castle, carrying the remnants of a woman he had loved and lost two thousand years ago.

He had waited twenty centuries for fate to give him something.

Fate, it seemed, had a sense of humor.