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 Persius not to 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 out what she 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 and fucked Nix’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.
“Offer me that fucking elixir again, and I’ll drown you in it!” Nix dared her.
“What’s happening?” Persius asked, distressed. Distressed for Elle.
Nix ground her teeth. Elle thought she could enchant Nix’s mate? After everything Nix went through for a second chance?
“Y-You need to calm down,” Elle told her, but it had the opposite effect. “You don’t know what you’re—”
“Stop,” a masculine voice yelled out, and everything went black.
Being carried away for acting “crazy” by Bael, the impulsive and knife-wielding sex demon, was a new low for Nix. He carried her away from Elle’s dorm room—where Elle cried over her broken wrist, and Persius fawned over her.
After hearing Nix’s chaotic yelling of “What did you do to him?” and Elle’s damsel-in-distress voice shouting for her to calm down, Bael had wrapped his arms around Nix’s waist and physically dragged her from Elle’s room just as Nix…fainted. Another new low.
Damsels fainted. Nix was no damsel.
Nix had just broken someone’s wrist in a burst of fury and passed out.
Humiliating.
Carrying her down the hallway, when Nix awoke in his arms, Bael immediately covered her mouth to muffle her various statements of, “This isn’t right! This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Let me fucking kill her!”
“Shhh, no exclamations of preconceived murder in the public hallway,” Bael whispered to her. “It’ll get me too horny, and I’ll be forced to fuck you against the wall while others watch.”
Stunned, Nix sputtered but remained quiet.
When he finally carried Nix out of the dorm building, he dropped her onto the grass and sat down in front of her.
“Want to tell me what that was all about?” Bael asked her, crisscrossing his legs. “You just broke your adoptive sister’s wrist and cryptically screamed about what she ‘did to you.’”
He added, “I thought, between the two of us, you were the more rational, patient, and thinks-things-through person. We can’t both be impulsive and prone to violence, baby. We’d make the world fucking bleed.”
Nix huffed and stood, dusting Ryker’s button-down off for possible grass stains. “You can’t just manhandle me like that,” she snapped at him.
Rising from his spot on the grass, he stood and said, “You like it when I manhandle you.”
A faint pink blush threatened to break out over her cheeks when she thought about how dominant Bael could be in her fantasies. Holding my throat, my wrists, and pinning me to a wall. Bending me over a desk and slapping my ass.
Distracting!
“Not out in public,” she said. “I don’t appreciate being treated like a crazy person.”
Elle was with Persius. Persius did not know Nix was his mate. This timeline was…fucked. I feel like I’m going crazy.
Bael cocked his head to the side and studied her. “You were spouting off nonsense about the future like a crazy person. You broke Council President Oadess’s darling daughter’s wrist—which, by the way, very hot.”
Rage.
There was an emotional tornado inside Nix, sucking up every bit of panic, dread, fury, and heartbreak, and creating a monstrous wrath. Elle may have slept with Persius last night. She wanted to burn Elle’s bed. She wanted to burn the whole dorm building.
Maybe this second chance at life was actually a thinly veiled curse of misfortune. Was it karma for letting herself get distracted by the new men in her life? Incubus Bael, dragon shifter Ryker, and gargoyle shifter Professor Thierry. Was this bad luck caused by not being loyal to Persius?
“Fuck you.” She jabbed a finger into Bael’s hard chest, and he flinched.
“Are you—” Bael’s expression twisted into one of horror, a rare occurrence for the man raised in literal Hell. “—crying?”
“You have no idea what is going on.” She jabbed her finger into him again, ignoring the sensual sparks that infiltrated her whenever they touched. Her emotions swayed and blazed between hurt and heartache to anger. “No idea what this means. You…You have no clue.”
What had she done to the future? What if, after everything, she still ended up captured and all alone? No Persius to provide her a light in the darkness?
Bael’s red eyes narrowed viciously on her. He grabbed her chin, forcing her to maintain eye contact as he rasped, “Then, fucking inform me, baby.”
His sex-in-the-woods alpha scent clouded her brain.
She tried to tear her chin from his grasp, but he would not let her go. She exhaled sharply and asked, “Where did Thierry go?”
Without Professor Thierry, Nix’s second mate, Nix had all of Bael’s undivided, slightly chaotic, and dangerous attention on her. She could not escape Bael and return to Elle’s room like her instincts screamed for her to do.
“Had to head to his class. Real stickler for the rules, that one.”
“I want to go to potions class,” Nix snapped. She needed a potion. Immediately. Before she marched right back to Elle’s room and threatened to burn it down with some matches and a whole lot of spite.
Had the Oadess family or Elle been poisoning Nix on purpose? Had Elle chosen Persius on purpose? Elle had never known Persius in the other timeline.
Things are changing so quickly.
“Hey,” Bael said in a serious tone and lightly collared her neck with his fingers, so she had no escape from him. “What happened back there?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Hm,” Bael made a noncommittal sound as he stared at her with an unreadable expression. “What did you mean by ‘this isn’t how it’s supposed to be’ when you yelled at her?”
“I haven’t had any breakfast. Clearly, skipping the most important meal of the day can have detrimental consequences,” Nix replied.
“Just before I grabbed you, you were shouting, ‘What did you do to him?’ Who is ‘him’?”
“You didn’t see him?” Nix thought back to how Elle had shoved Persius back behind her when Nix started shouting.
“I have a very strange habit now of only seeing you when I enter rooms.” Bael sighed. “Was there a guy in her room? I saw you and scooped you up immediately.”
Nix glanced down at Bael’s tensed forearm and asked, “Can you let go of my neck now?” He did not squeeze or cause any pain, but the fingers felt like a warm, dominating leash. It…distracted her body.
“Baby.” Bael stepped closer to her, so his lips grazed the side of her cheek and spoke directly into her ear. “As surprising as it sounds, I do not like being kept in the dark. I told you my secrets earlier.”
Right. Like the secret that Bael and the sexy and grunting dragon shifter named Ryker were attending the academy for one purpose: to end the student disappearances, find the missing students, and bring justice.
Bael believed that Nix’s adoptive father, Shifter Council President Kellan Oadess, was somehow behind the student disappearances because certain species he spoke ill of were the ones declining in population.
Nix wanted to know if Kellan Oadess was tied to the disappearances and if so…had he known Nix was captured and held in a cage, victim to torturous experiments performed on her by a mad scientist for years in her past life? If he knew…I will destroy him, Nix promised herself.
Nix was lucky she was given a second chance at life to change her future and punish the perpetrators of her future death. I cannot mess up this chance.
Right now, Bael wanted to know things Nix could not explain.
I’m actually myself six years into the future, but I woke up in my twenty-year-old body with a second chance. But now my mate is with my ex-best friend, who—I think—has been poisoning me since childhood.
Nix nibbled on her bottom lip and breathed in more of Bael’s alluring, sensual, and earthy rain scent.