Fangs, Fate & Other Bad Decisions novel Chapter 66

Chapter 66

Griffin hasn’t spoken to me since this morning–he just gives me these looks. Like he’s got commentary loaded in a chamber but knows I’m one twitch away from losing it altogether. I slam my drawer harder than necessary and watch a hairline crack spider across the mahogany like it personally betrayed me.

I pace in front of the monitors again and again, one of them now frozen on the image of her laughing at another man, even though it replays in my mind with a cruel kind of clarity.

That smile wasn’t meant for anyone else.

Griffin hovers near the door, his arms crossed and his eyes narrowed with that knowing look he’s perfected over the last few centuries. “Still watching the cameras?” he asks.

I don’t answer. I don’t need to.

He clicks his tongue, as if I’m an errand child, “You know, if you’d just talk to her instead of stalking her like a tragic ex, this whole spiral could

“Don’t.” I cut him off with a glare that’s sharp enough to gut someone, “Not today.”

“It’s always “not today‘. That’s the problem.” He starts, as he steps farther into the room, ignoring my unspoken order to stay out. “You’re unraveling, Thane. And before you ask–yes, it’s obvious. You haven’t fed properly in days, your temper’s on a hair trigger, and you nearly decapitated Camden for asking if you wanted the lights dimmed during the presentation earlier.”

“I told him not to sneak up on me,” I grumble.

“He cleared his throat,” he volleys at me.

1 turn away from him, grinding the heel of my palm into my eye socket like I can erase the images burned into the backs of them–Harley, laughing. Harley, blushing. Harley, giving some mortal her phone number, as if it’s harmless.

Like she’s free. Like she’s not mine.

The alert comes through just after lunchtime. A message encoded in an old council cipher a language few remember well, which is probably why they chose it. When I open the file, I feel the air shift around me.

My fangs itch, and my shoulders tighten at the name written there: Raven.

A name I haven’t spoken aloud in decades–a ghost draped in luxurious silk and malicious spite.

Griffin catches the shift in my expression from across the room where he sits on my couch, finalizing my keynote speech for tomorrow night that I won’t be giving. “Who is it?”

I don’t look up as I answer him, “Someone I buried a long time ago.”

The report

vague, as council communiqués always are sightings near our territory, whispers in back alleys, overlapping with the same trails we’ve been chasing since the threat emerged. Nothing definitive. But enough to raise suspicion.

She wouldn’t. Except, the might.

Once, she was the closest thing I had to an equal. Fierce. Beautiful in that lethal, moonlit way only the oldest among us could be. We tore through centuries together, two monsters who thought we understood each other. She wanted power and wanted to rule beside me. But more than that, the wanted permanence.

She wanted my mark. To be chosen by me.

I remember the way she asked me the first time. No, not asked–demanded–like it was already hers. The marking is sacred and irrevocable. It binds more than just the pair’s names–it binds their souls and their fates. She said it didn’t matter that I didn’t feel it yet, or that maybe I never would.

But I always believed in the myth. In the promise of the Moon Goddess. In the idea of a true, fated mate. I always knew there was something else -someone else–coming. Even when it felt childish, even when I’d lived for hundreds of years without so much as a whisper of that kind of connection. And even though I didn’t think it would be Harley, or that my fate would arrive wrapped in sarcasm, oversized hoodies, and laughter that feels like salvation, I instinctively knew Raven wasn’t what the Moon Goddess had destined for me.

Raven called it weakness, said numerous times that I was hiding behind ‘fairy tales“.

There were whispers for a while after that–of allies she’d been collecting, of power trades and silent coups brewing in corners I didn’t care to look into. But I let her go nonetheless. And so far, she hasn’t breached my territory, nor has she challenged me directly.

Until now, it would seem.

I stare down at the council’s vague warning and feel the bite of old wounds, still sore even after all these centuries. She’s a powerful ally or a dangerous enemy. And if she’s tangled up in this, it’s no coincidence.

1 buzz Nico, my head of security. “Find Raven. Discreetly. I want to know where she’s been for the last 12 months, who she’s been seen with, and what she wants.”

I hang up without saying goodbye, and my hands clench around the edge of my desk. I don’t want this to be her. I don’t want the rage that’s boiling deep in my gut to be twisted into something that’ll become personal. But if she’s part of this… If she’s put Harley in any type of danger…

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