Shifter's Bargain: A Dance With Destiny Novels & Stories

She pointed to the bracklet clasped around my wrist. “You are now the woman of the hour. I know a real diamond when I see one, courtesy of Louis." she chimed in, wiggling her eyebrows. My cheeks burned, and I swatted at her arm. “Stop it. It’s not like that.” “Not like that? Girl, you have been upgraded. Diamond gifts, billionaire man, and, oh wait, what about that maid? What was her name? Shasha? The one who went psycho. Is she still around?"

The trouble is, she hasn't shifted often enough in recent years. To stay nimble, shifters must shift back and forth as nature calls. A shifter who stays too long in beast form, will forget how to become human again, and vice versa. Living with Minette, her hafling granddaughter who never manifested as a shifter, she wasn't able to run wild as often as she'd like. Especially when they were hiding in cities. Now, weak, hungry, and injured, it is even harder to call up the magic. Remember. Remember what it's like. She thinks about her first shift at puberty, the joy of chasing her sister through the French countryside. There.

​Oh, God. She squeezed her eyes shut. Don’t fall in love with him, don’t fall in love with him, don’t fall in love with him. She scoffed, yanking her arm free as she sat up. “What? You think you’re all that and then some? That I cannot resist you? I’ll have you know... my heart... was not part of our bargain. You’re the boss and I’m the employee. This is an arrangement.” ​One callused palm ran slowly up the side of her leg, the heat of it seeping through her skin. “And yet it’s easy to forget who we are here, isn’t it? Easy to get confused.”

If you dare slack off, I'll throw you to the dogs in the pen. I looked despairingly at the man I had loved for three years. Every shred of my dignity was ground to dust in that instant. I gritted my teeth and forced the words out. "Fine. I'll dance." If this was the price to end all of this, then I was willing to pay it. Kayden patted my cheek with a satisfied look. "That's more like it." He stood up and gently picked Vera up before carrying her out of the ward to get a full checkup.

“I hate every one of you. “I never want to see any of you again.” Then the light swallowed me. And I disappeared from the shifter world for good. --- Three years had passed since I returned to my own world. At first, I still woke from nightmares, trapped again in that other life. But work grew busier. Time moved on. Slowly, the memories faded. The shifters’ faces blurred until they no longer seemed real. Sometimes, I wondered whether it had all been nothing more than a nightmare.

And she had succeeded. As I stood to leave, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was just about to make a deal with the devil. But I wouldn't, because devils always had a price. And everything wasn't just about the inheritance, it was about just one thing: vengeance. My phone buzzed, its vibration hitching against my skin. "Yes?" I said. "Anything?" "Yes, sir. They seemed so excited about the whole thing and we think we should strike while the iron is hot."

I raised my brows, even more confused. “So your card has a sum of money in it that is deposited monthly by your family. For those of us that live in the human realm, the shifter realm has a conversion method, so you don’t have to worry. They’ll convert your money to Wolf bucks. Though the exchange rate is a bitch. Shifter currency is pretty high against the dollar but… the value of one Wolf buck is really high. So you don’t have to worry too much,” he smiled like he hadn’t just spat out a series of crazy words in a sequence I had never heard in my life. Realm?

I knew I was starting to reek of it, the stench of a loser clinging to my skin. ​I didn't have the luxury of playing the long game. If I didn't secure Ethan and his staggering fortune within the month, Voss Dynamics wouldn't just stumble; it would crater into a humiliating bankruptcy. I’d be left as a queen without a throne, a laughingstock in the corporate and pack circles alike. Since nature was moving at a glacial pace and the "fated bond" was failing to melt his resolve, I decided to give destiny the chemical shove it clearly needed. ​I found my way into the gray markets of the shifter underworld, the kind of place where the air smells like rot and old magic. I sought out a witch who dea

You will definitely shift," Bella assured me enthusiastically. I wanted to hope, but each failed year flashed in my memory like a bad dream. What if it didn’t happen? My stomach flipped at the thought of being sold to those creepy middle-aged men my father called friends. It was the day, and we were heading out to the woods. The Shifting Grounds were the highest land in the pack. It was where the Solstice full moon was the biggest and brightest, and where the Alpha would guide new shifters through their first shift. I just hoped I would be one of them this year.

Instead, I put on a show that would leave them both green with envy. *~*~* Isobelle The rest of the afternoon dragged by at a leisurely pace, and the boys and I spent most of it watching back-to-back episodes of a shifter drama called Shifter Valley. There were plenty of covert scandals, breaking pack laws, illicit affairs, rejecting mates for the rogue next door, a wolf shifter trying to explain to her mate that she was pregnant with a bear shifter’s cub. They even did the thousand-yard stare right before the ending credits rolled. After I watched the first episode, I was hooked. I was sure the boys regretted giving me dominion of the TV remote.