MAGIC CAPTIVE

In this savage why choose romantasy, fated mates, forced proximity, and phoenixes rising from ashes collide when one broken heroine must heal enough to bond with three protective alpha phoenix shifters—before the psychopath in her head destroys two dying worlds.

A shattered Chosen.
A corrupted soul-bond.
Three phoenix kings who died to free me—and arrived moments too late.

In a dying Faerie where magic bleeds from corrupted ley-lines, I wake from enchanted ice to find the man who freed me wasn't my savior—he was my nightmare. Artus carved a partial bond into my soul. He's inside me now. Always watching. Always hurting. And he won't let go.

Three phoenix shifters—Cedar, Calder, and Ryland—claim I'm their fated mate, the Chosen one destined to reunite an ancient grimoire and save two dying worlds. They burned themselves to ash to melt my prison. When they rose, I was already broken.

Now I'm trapped with three overprotective males who feel my every pain through our incomplete bonds and would burn the world to keep me safe. Every touch from them weakens Artus's corruption. Every moment we grow closer enrages the monster in my head. They say completing our soul-bond will destroy his hold. That their combined magic is stronger than his darkness.

But healing means vulnerability. Bonding means surrender. And I don't know how to trust again.

Five other Chosen—my sisters—wait across a failing barrier to reunite the grimoire's fragments. Artus grows stronger by the day, feeding on my fear. If I can't heal enough to complete the mate bonds, both worlds fall into eternal winter and wasteland.

The monster in my head whispers I'm too broken to save anyone.
My mates swear love can burn away any corruption.
Only one of them can be right.

Read if you like:

🔥 Fierce, protective phoenix shifters and fated mates who died to save her

💔 Why-choose romance with trauma recovery and patient, possessive alphas

✨ Chosen One prophecy, corrupted bonds, and ancient grimoire reunification

🌑 Healing through touch, soul-light connections, and three males who feel her pain

🪶 Phoenix fire, death and rebirth, and the power of rising from ashes

⚡ Forced proximity with overprotective mates in an isolated castle

👑 Shattered heroine reclaiming agency and learning to want again

🗡️ Psychopath villain living inside her head, tormenting through corrupted bond

💫 Sisterhood across dying worlds and six Chosen fighting to save everything

🔥 High-heat intimacy as healing, soul-bonds burning away corruption

⚔️ Touch her and die energy, alphas who'd raze worlds to keep her safe

🌙 Hurt/comfort, soft darkness, and males who wait however long she needs

🌊 Purifying corrupted magic, restoring dying worlds, becoming queens

💎 Found family, fierce females, and mates who prove love isn't control

Content notes: Magic Unleashed contains mature themes, explicit scenes, references to past trauma, SA, and brutal survival. For adult readers. This is a dark romantasy with heavy trauma themes and healing through supportive relationships. The assault happens early and its aftermath is central to the story. Please read with care. Always read the trigger warnings.

CHAPTER ONE

Cold bit through skin, gnawed bone, scraped the inside of my lungs with every breath. Stone pressed against my back. Rough. Wet. Ice slicked the surface, crystals digging into my spine through the thin fabric of my tunic. My fingers scraped against the floor, nails catching on frost. Darkness pressed down, thick as water, broken only by a pale blue glow that pulsed somewhere to my left.

Where was I—

Pain exploded behind my eyes when I pried them open. White-hot. Blinding.

Where was the jungle? The mangoes heavy in my satchel? There’d been three of them, their weight bumping against my hip as I'd walked. I’d been happy I wouldn’t go hungry tonight. Sunlight filtered through canopy leaves, green and gold dappling the forest floor as I’d made my way back to my hut. Sweat trickled between my shoulder blades. My bare feet had known every root, every stone.

Then light. Blinding, wrong, splitting the air apart. Fabric torn from the world’s bones. The force sent me spinning. Up vanished. Down became sky. Pressure crushed my chest, wind howled inside my skull. The world unraveled, threads ripped loose. Cell by cell. I fell through emptiness, deafened by the roar, substance unstitched, nothing left but static and loss.

Stone slammed beneath my spine. Cold bit straight through soggy, ruined clothes. No earth, only ice. No sun, only choking dark pressing against my eyelids, sinking into my bones. Air burned my lungs. Limbs sprawled useless. Every joint screamed. Muscles howled in protest, nerves refusing to fire. My entire body had been splintered, then glued back together wrong.

"You’re finally awake. About time." The woman’s voice slithered out of the black, velvet layered over steel. Cultured. Bored. The sound crawled over my skin, lingered on the raw spots.

Her words seemed to come from everywhere. No shape, no shadow in sight. Vision blurred, edges seething with intense white. My head refused to lift. Nerves scrambled, as if someone had drained out the marrow. Hands wouldn’t twitch. Legs—gone, hollow.

Footsteps coming toward me. Click. Click. Click. Heels on stone, patient, predatory. The sound echoed across invisible walls. Each step sharp, cutting, counting down.

Move. Move, godsdammit. Get up.

Nothing. Panic burned in my throat, thick and poisonous. Teeth chattered. Darkness gathered around me, swallowing light, swallowing hope. The woman circled, unseen but everywhere. The cold pressed closer. The waiting teeth of the dark sharpened.

"Interesting how I killed you, and there you are. Popping back to life." A pause, voice curling like smoke. "I’m sure you can imagine how I find that most remarkable."

A crimson glow seeped through the dark, too bright and too sharp to be any natural light. Magic bleeding over the stone.

Only The Six and their chosen pets ever shone with magic this strong. Anyone born with magic ended up dead. Magic was a death sentence. The dungeons in Titan’s stronghold reeked of it, burned magic carved into stone by The Cadre. Sinon, Peder and Kalos. Hells own hounds brought to Earth, imbued with Titans magic and evil enough to wield it.

They’d found me in the jungle as I’d scrounged for food, my stomach twisted and empty, the sun burning stripes into my arms. I ran. They caught me. I was so weak it wasn't hard.

They’d dragged me back to the stronghold and threw me in a freezing dungeon. They’d fired fists, boots and questions in my face between cracks of knuckles. They wanted me to tell them about the panther shifters. Secrets, should I have them. I gave them nothing. Not when blood filled my mouth, and the world spun with each new kick.

Someone watched every lash of magic. A woman in the shadows, silent, made to witness every blow. Her eyes never met mine until The Cadre grew bored when I stayed silent. They called me useless, less than nothing, then spat and left me lying in the muck for dead.

Magic came for me again, spreading across the ceiling, crawling and branching like living frost. Tendrils snaked along every seam, icy veins bleeding into stone. The temperature plunged. My breath turned white, fog curling past cracked lips. Ice rattled on my eyelashes. Each inhale seared raw.

A figure coalesced at the heart of the light. Skin flawless, too pale for life. Eyes the green of old glass, searching and pitiless. Hair pale as bone, swept up, not a strand out of place. She wore crimson, suit cut sharp as a fresh wound. When her lips twisted and nothing moved in her eyes.

Copper flooded my mouth. My jaw clamped shut, fighting the scream boiling behind my teeth.

That face. I would never forget that face.

Britheva.

The name screamed through my skull. One of The Six who had cut me open with a twitch of her finger searching for…what?

“Are you ready to give me what I’m looking for, little mouse?”

Run. Scream. Move. Do something.

My body refused. Frozen. Not from cold, but from magic. It pinned me to the stone, invisible chains wrapping wrists, ankles, throat. The pressure increased. Ribs creaking. Air thinning.

"You have something I want." Britheva crouched beside me, her face filling my vision. Sea-glass eyes studied me like I was a specimen. Interesting. Disposable. "Inside you. Locked away. So hard to find, but when you know what you’re looking for it’s quite obvious.”

“I don’t— I know nothing—” My tongue was thick and unwieldy, both through cold and terror.

"Don't play stupid." Her hand hovered, pale fingers splayed above my chest. "I taste it. Old magic. Royal magic. The grimoire, no less. Woven into your very soul. So very delicious."

A crimson glow bloomed in her palm. Light bled over her wrist and spilled down onto my chest, icy tendrils snaking over my skin. The cold stung so sharp it burned. Frost crawled along my arms, crept up my throat, spreading its infection beneath my clothes. Muscles jerked uselessly, nerves lit up by the frost, raw and sparking.

"I've spent centuries hunting this grimoire. It’s been the bane of my existence. We thought it was lost until we discovered your little secret. Very clever, breaking it into six different pieces and hiding it in bloodlines." Her smile sharpened, all teeth. "And then, when we went to reclaim what was ours… poof. Gone again. Imagine my disappointment. My dismay. And now—now I’ve found you. And you will give it to me."

Her voice echoed off stone as her magic drove into my chest. I arched, heels scraping stone. This was not pain. This was obliteration. My unmaking. My mind shredded, nerves set ablaze, every cell tearing and shrieking for air.

She wasn't cutting skin. She was unraveling me from the inside out, groping through blood and marrow, digging for secrets buried deeper than memory. My bones rattled. My head split. Muscles strained, locked, the cold pressing in so fierce I felt it in my teeth.

Something shifted inside me. Deep inside, beneath the agony, a flicker of cold scales brushed against heatless bone. A flash of a long, serpentine body, emerald and silver, coiling in the dark. The vision snapped away before I could grab hold, leaving only the echo, wild and ancient and mine.

Britheva hissed an inhuman sound, slip of fury beneath her polished cruelty. The magic yanked free, scalding as it left.

Air slammed into my lungs. I choked. Blood filled my mouth, thick and metallic, sliding down my tongue as I gasped and shuddered on the ice-bitten stone

"Protected." The word dripped venom. "They bound it with sacrifice. Blood magic. Death magic. The kind that requires—" She stopped. Tilted her head. "Ah. Your parents. How touching."

No.

"They loved you enough to die for you. How rare. How wasteful." Her fingers traced my collarbone. Ice followed. "But all magic has limits. All protections, loopholes. I simply need to break you first."

She stood.

Magic slammed into me again. Different this time. Not searching—destroying. Her magic flooded my veins, turned blood to ice, stopped my heart mid-beat.

Dying.

This is dying.

Darkness swallowed everything. Cold became absolute. My body ceased. Gone. Nothing remained except the sensation of falling through endless void, down and down and—

Gasp.

Air. Burning. My lungs convulsed, dragging oxygen through passages that shouldn't work, into a heart that shouldn't beat.

The cave resolved around me. Stone. Ice. Britheva's smile.

"Give it to me and I’ll make it stop.” She rolled her eyes when my jaw wouldn’t work, when no words came. If I could have spoken, I’d have told her I didn’t know anything about a grimoire. I didn’t have parents. I was an orphan. Nobody. Human. Just a body clawing for survival, no magic worth dying for, nothing but scars, and—.

"This is your choice," she said.

She killed me again.

And again.

Each death different. Heart stopping. Lungs flooding. Throat closing. Spine snapping. Each rebirth worse—magic forcing me back, dragging me screaming from darkness into agony.

Time stopped meaning anything. Existed only in cycles: dying, returning, dying, returning. Britheva's voice wove through it all, cultured and patient, explaining the magic, the theory, the necessary steps to break death-bound protections.

I stopped fighting. Stopped thinking. Became only pain and terror and the desperate animal instinct to make it stop please gods make it stop.

"Where is it?" Her voice, close to my ear. "The grimoire fragment. I can feel it inside you. Tell me how to access it."

"Don't—" My voice cracked. Raw. Destroyed. "Don't know—"

"Liar."

Magic ripped through me. Not death this time. Worse. It invaded my mind, clawing through memories, tearing open thoughts I'd buried, dragging up every nightmare, every shame, every moment of helpless terror from years under Titan's rule.

I shattered.

Nothing existed except violation. The sense of being opened, exposed, everything I'd hidden peeled back and left raw for her to sift through. Shame blistered under my skin, every secret yanked into the cold, every broken piece on display. Britheva's magic crawled deeper, scraping places inside me that had never seen light.

She would never stop. She wanted something that wasn’t there, digging and clawing and tearing, again and again. I was losing my grip, reality flickering behind my eyelids. Delirium pressed in, turning the world sideways. Thought broke apart. The ground rattled beneath me. At first, I blamed the fever, the magic. Britheva’s voice blurred, stretched thin. The cave swam.

Then the world really did shake.

A roar erupted. Not a mere sound but a force that vibrated through the stone, through my bones, inside my teeth. Primal thunder. Furious, wild, hungry. The desperation, enraged sound shivered through every nerve, yanking me from the edge of oblivion. Air tasted electric. My heart staggered. The vibration owned the cave. For a second, it owned the world.

Britheva froze. Her hand snapped back from my chest as three shapes burst through the entrance. Too fast, too bright, bodies crackling with energy.

Serpents.

The beasts filling the space weren’t just big. They were monstrous. Scales shimmered all along their bodies, impossibly long, thick as ancient trees. One blue as the abyss, scales edged in silver. One blue as summer sky, stripes of gold running like lightning down his length. The last, blue as midnight, shadow pooling between each coil. They flowed, twisting through the cavern, bodies moving with impossible speed and liquid grace. Their presence ate up the air, suffocating, inescapable.

The blue serpent lunged at Britheva, massive jaws gaping. She threw up her hands, magic sparking to life, crimson light hissing outward. Blue and red collided in the cave’s center, the flash splintering stone. The impact shuddered through my body, through the floor, through every useless inch of me.

The other two serpents rushed toward me.

Terror shot through my gut. My mind drowned in old nightmares. Childhood fevers, venom turning my blood to fire, scales slithering up my arms, hissing circling my dreams. Every muscle screamed to move, to run, but my body lay useless. I could only watch.

Two two serpents touched me as the tip of the third’s tail whipped over my thigh.

Scales erupted along my arms, iridescent emerald becoming my skin. My jaw ached, mouth stretching wide, teeth lengthening, sharpening. Limbs shrank, twisted, melted into my body. My senses split apart: taste swallowed scent, heat patterns showed everywhere, the air riddled with the tang of blood, fear, and venom. My sight blurred, then sharpened. New colors, new shapes painted across the cave.

Magic surged down my spine, cold and electric. The world shrank to sensation. The friction of ice beneath my belly, the hiss of my own breath, the vibration of my mates' hearts pounding beside me.

I was—

I’d Changed—

Ozone snapped around me as the serpents Changed. Within breaths, the serpents became male. Three figures where monsters had been.

Blue-skinned. Muscled. Beautiful in a way that punched the breath from my lungs.

Wrong.

Inhuman.

Each sharp-featured face sculpted with fierce purpose. Eyes glowed, too bright for the dim cave. One sapphire, one aquamarine shot with gold, one deep and relentless as indigo night. Silver scales dusted their cheekbones. Fangs flashed between parted lips. The one with chopped platinum hair fixed his gaze on me, eyes boring straight through my skin, intensity raw and palpable. The golden-blonde male’s hand trembled, the warmth of his palm hovering just above mine. The tallest, darkest, broadest of the three moved without a word, positioning himself between Britheva and me, his body a living wall, every muscle taut and ready for violence.

"Mate." The word came from all three at once. Layered. Reverent. Absolute.

What?

My attempt to speak came out as a ragged hiss, not words. Panic squeezed my chest. My body wasn’t mine. It was fangs, scales, hunger, a coil of instinct wound tight.

Britheva’s shriek cut through the magic. Rage twisted her flawless face into something unrecognizable. "You dare—"

The dark-skinned male shouted, "Change!" Power erupted through the cavern, a force beyond every boundary I’d ever known. It rippled straight through muscle and bone, snapping my shape again. One blink, and I was human, collapsed and shivering on the icy stone, naked and gasping for air.

"Run." His voice sliced through panic.

The platinum-haired one moved first. He swept me up, arms impossibly strong. The world spun as he tossed me over his shoulder, my stomach smacking against hard muscle. His grip secured my thighs, careful but unyielding. Each stride jarred my guts, his broad shoulder driving into my belly, knocking the breath from my lungs, every step a fresh jolt. My hands dangled uselessly, fingers numb with cold and shock. Blood roared in my ears.

Chaos exploded behind us. Britheva’s magic lashed wild and crimson, crackling in the air, splintering stone.

Footfalls drummed over rock and grit. The stone gave way to snow, frigid air burning across my cheeks, my hair whipping behind. Wind screamed past, cutting through me all the way to bone.

Cold air hit my face. Wind. Screaming. Endless white stretching in every direction.

We were outside. Running. Snow sprayed beneath their feet as they bolted away from Britheva's fury echoing behind us.

What the fuck just happened?

Britheva's scream split the frozen air.

The platinum-haired one's grip tightened. "Change and run!"

The tallest male with long blue hair streaming behind him snapped his hand through the air. The force whipped up a storm of ice. Shards and frost spun in a dizzying cyclone, the world vanishing into a blinding white blur. Every breath tasted of ozone, sharp and electric, charged with magic.

Then scales pressed firm around my waist in a sudden, powerful grip, smooth as silk and cold as hail. The ground dropped away, and I was lifted, weightless. Another serpent form, massive and sinuous, coiled me close, then burst forward. My body pressed to his, every muscle jostled with each flex and twist.

We tore through the blizzard. The speed made my eyes sting and water. Wind slapped my cheeks, whipped hair against my face, seared my lungs. Snow flew past, a blur of pale and blue. The world narrowed to rushing cold, the bite of scales beneath my skin, the thunder of a serpent’s heart carrying me through the ice, away from death.

Trigger Warning

This book contains:

⚠️ S*xual Assault

⚠️ Trauma recovery - extensive scenes dealing with aftermath of sexual violence, PTSD, flashbacks, panic responses

⚠️ Psychological torture - villain torments heroine through corrupted soul-bond throughout the book (intrusive thoughts, pain inflicted remotely, constant violation of mental boundaries)

⚠️ Past child abuse/neglect - references to heroine's childhood in slavery, witnessing violence, surviving alone from age 10

⚠️ Graphic violence - battle scenes, torture (not of heroine but referenced/remembered), death

⚠️ Explicit sexual content - multiple detailed intimate scenes (consensual, but may be triggering given SA in early chapters)

⚠️ Themes of bodily autonomy violation - magical bond forced on heroine without consent, constant presence of abuser in her mind

⚠️ Death/resurrection - phoenix shifters die and regenerate (not graphic but present)

⚠️ Suicidal ideation - brief moments where heroine wishes for escape through death (not pursued, addressed through support)

⚠️ Discussions of consent and power dynamics - extensive focus on rebuilding trust and agency after violation

MAGIC CAPIVE COMING SOON