MAGIC UNLEASHED
In this savage why choose romantasy, fated mates, dark obsession, and tangled devotion ensnare one broken heroine in a ruthless game of survival and forbidden magic with three lethal serpentine shifters.
A hunted Chosen.
A poisoned serpent bond.
Three ruthless shifters who want my magic—or my ruin.
In a decaying Faerie where anyone magical is hunted, I am the secret this land wants dead. I wake in a frozen cave to Britheva demanding the ancient grimoire she claims is hidden inside me. I don’t have magic. If I did, I wouldn’t be a slave. The lowest of the low.
A nightmare finds me in the form of three serpentine shifters with eyes like knives and hunger I feel in my bones. Navaree, Seakal, and Talesian claim I’m their fated mate, the Chosen one with magic that will save worlds, unlocked when I give my heart. Every touch shatters me. Every promise feels like a trap. They say the bond is power, not slavery. I call danger.
Love is just another way to bleed. To control.
The magic inside me refuses to stay quiet. The bond ignites despite my best attempts to suppress it. Rage, lust, terror. My soul-light twists with theirs until I can’t tell fear from longing.
If I surrender, will I finally belong or just become someone else’s captive?
Read if you like:
🐍 Feral, seductive serpentine shifters and dangerous fated mates
🔥 Why-choose romance with scalding tension and slow-burn healing
⚡ Chosen One prophecy, hidden magic, and ancient grimoire secrets
💔 Trauma, scars, and raw emotional recovery through found family
🌙 Shifter worlds with soul-lights, forbidden bonds, and searing connection
✨ Sensory magic—taste, touch, color, power in every scene
👑 Broken heroines fighting for freedom and the right to choose their fate
🗡️ Ruthless villains, relentless pursuit, and survival in a decaying realm
💫 Transformation, belonging, and the wild ache to finally be wanted
🔥 Steamy, high-stakes intimacy and dangerous devotion
⚔️ Healing after betrayal, fierce mates, and a heroine who will bite before she bows
Content notes: Magic Captive contains mature themes, explicit scenes, references to past trauma, and brutal survival. For adult readers. Trigger details on author’s website.
CHAPTER ONE
I was going to die in the cold. Not quickly or cleanly. I would die the slow kind of death where I felt every second of my body giving up before darkness took me. My lungs seized, air turning to glass in my chest. Sharp crystalline pain spread through my ribs, into my spine, down to my fingertips. Then my heart stuttered, skipped. The silence terrified me more than the pain. My pulse went quiet and I knew I was slipping away. Darkness swallowed everything.
And then I woke.
Woke to the same crushing pressure of ice encasing my body. The same moment of confused terror before my brain caught up and remembered. This had happened before. Would happen again. The blacking out never stopped. It paused long enough to let me feel the dread building before starting over.
Where was I? The question rose every time consciousness returned, fragmenting before I could follow the thought anywhere useful. A cell? A tomb?
Someone had put me here or I'd stumbled into this frozen prison. Neither answer mattered when I kept losing consciousness over and over.
How long had this been happening? Hours? Days? Time meant nothing when every moment blurred into the same pattern. Pain. Darkness. Waking. Losing consciousness again.
The ice pressed against every inch of me, a tomb that wouldn't let me rest. Wouldn't release me into whatever came after. It held me suspended in the worst moment, the instant before I lost consciousness, and refused to let me pass through to the other side.
I tried to scream but my throat was frozen shut. The sound died before it could form, trapped inside me with all the other things I couldn't release. Terror. Horror. The desperate need for this—whatever this was—to stop.
The cold had turned my muscles to stone. My fingers wouldn't curl. My toes wouldn't flex. Even my eyelids refused to close, forcing me to stare into the dim blue of the ice tomb while my body shut down.
All I could do was feel the next brutal wave of unconsciousness coming. Feel my lungs burst with that desperate ache for air. Feel my heart struggling, each beat slower than the last. Feel the darkness creeping in from the edges of my vision, narrowing the world to a pinpoint before swallowing that too.
And when I woke again, the cycle started over. Again and again and again and nothing I could do would stop it. The pattern should have dulled with repetition. It didn't. I tried to brace for it, prepare for it, endure without the spike of terror that came each time but every time felt like the first. Every waking was a temporary reprieve before the inevitable. My mind couldn't adjust. Couldn't accept. It kept fighting, kept hoping, kept breaking apart when the cold proved stronger than my will to survive.
How many times had I blacked out? Ten? A hundred? My thoughts splintered before I could count, fragmenting like ice under pressure. There was no before, no after. Only this endless loop of agony and confusion.
The worst part was the knowing. Those brief seconds of consciousness between blackouts when my mind cleared enough to understand what was happening. To realize I was trapped. For the terror to rise before the cold dragged me under again.
I didn't know why this was happening.
I didn't know who had done this to me.
I didn't know if I was already dead and this was a very fucked up afterlife.
Sometimes, in those fleeting moments of awareness, I felt presences brushing against my mind. Warm ghosts where everything else was frozen. Steady when my thoughts shattered. They pressed into the spaces between consciousness and oblivion, intimate in a way that made my chest ache.
Three of them.
Probably nothing more than fever dreams. Hallucinations from hypothermia and whatever torture had landed me here. My mind breaking under the strain, inventing comfort where none existed.
But they felt real.
They felt like real people reaching through the ice, anchoring me when I started to drift. Like breath ghosting across my skin in the moments before darkness took me. Like warmth blooming low in my belly when everything else was numbness and pain.
I clung to these presences, holding onto them because the alternative was drowning in the frozen dark alone. I’d always been alone and it was… nice not to be. Just once in my fucked up life, I wanted to let someone in.
The presences pulsed against my awareness. Insistent. Refusing to let me slip away completely, when I wished I would not wake again. They wove through my fragmenting thoughts, catching the pieces before they scattered. One felt like fire barely contained. Another like shadow given form. The third like light that refused to dim.
Hold on.
The words weren't words. More a feeling, a certainty that hummed through whatever connection existed between us. Between me and these phantom presences that shouldn't exist.
We’re coming for you.
Lies. Beautiful lies my broken mind whispered to keep me sane. But I held onto them anyway because when they touched my awareness, something in me responded.
Memories surfaced between blackouts. Pieces of my life I once lived when I was very young. Vivid flashes of my life when I lived in Esoti’s castle made of stone walls so cold they hurt to touch. Harsh voices echoing through corridors I wasn't allowed to walk. Being small enough that people looked through me instead of at me. I remembered that. Remembered being invisible. Scrubbing floors until my hands bled, water turning pink in the bucket. The sting of split skin. The ache in my knees from kneeling too long.
Watching a platinum-haired girl younger than me take beatings meant for someone bigger, someone stronger, someone who mattered. Serafine’s face never blurred in the memory but I always remembered the crack of flesh meeting flesh. The way she never made a sound no matter how many bruises she wore. How I'd wanted to stop it and hadn't moved, paralyzed by my own smallness.
I’d escaped. Fled into the wolves forest with no plan but never to look back. Branches catching my clothes, tearing skin. The bite of hunger that went on for days. The ache of exhaustion that settled into my bones and never left. Discovering light in my palms when infection crawled through a wound on my leg, red and orange and yellow flames that danced across my skin and closed torn flesh without leaving scars.
I was ten years old the first time I’d healed. The first time I’d known that going back meant certain death and that I couldn't let anyone see what I could do.
I’d wandered throughout the land for years after that. Always looking over my shoulder, should one of Esoti’s magically-imbued guards would come looking for me but never did. Perhaps I was too good at hiding. Perhaps a nobody like me was never missed.
The memories compressed here, years bleeding together into a single stretch of movement. Seasons passing. Towns appearing and disappearing. Healing people for coin or food, closing wounds and curing fevers. Keeping my head down. Always secret and quiet. Moving before anyone could ask questions or remember my face.
I was good at disappearing. At being forgettable. Until I wasn't. Someone in panther territory had turned me in and The Cadre had come calling. So much for healing people there. So much for knowing my secret was out.
They threw me in a dungeon, but not the normal dungeons of horror below Titan’s stronghold. I was thrown into a special dungeon magically warded and forgotten. Both I and the other forgotten lived in pitch black until the guard came to hurt us. We were caged in stone walls that wept moisture. The smell of rot and fear. Screaming that echoed off those walls. My screams. Others' screams too. People I couldn't save no matter how much I wanted to.
Chains had bitten into my wrists and rattled when I shook. Especially during the torture that went on and on and on. So long I forgot what it was like not to be in pain. Sometimes I’d heal the worst when the guards left, but I never turned my ability to heal over to them. They would have had to carve it out of my bones, even if I could.
I thought I’d die there before a shockwave had blasted in the darkness and flung me into endless ice. Endless waking. Endless blacking out. Again. Again. Again. Trapped here with no way out.
My thoughts fractured. The memories slipped away. The cold dragged me down.
But the presences stayed. Warm points of light in the dark. And cold. Always so, so cold. Until it wasn’t. Until heat bloomed around me. Burning but not killing. The heat imbued the ice encasing my body in a warmth so intense it felt alive.
Fire. Though I didn't have words for what kind. I only knew it was melting the prison that had held me. Eating through the ice tomb I was frozen in.
The ice cracked. A sound like thunder, splitting the silence. The pressure around my body shifted. Loosened. More cracks spider-webbed across the surface, each one singing as the ice gave way before I fell.
The world spun. I gasped my first breath of air, my lungs expanding to draw in precious oxygen as I tumbled through space with nothing to grab onto, nothing to slow my descent. I freefall before I slammed into something solid. Pain exploded through my spine, radiating outward. I lay stunned, unable to move, unable to do anything except exist in the aftermath of the fall.
Sensation slowly returned. At least this time I hadn’t blacked out. My brain was so sluggish it took me a long time to sink in. I breathed. Ragged, painful breaths that tasted of blood, but breathing. My heart hammered against my ribs, too fast and too hard, but beating.
Snow pressed against my cheek. Wind howled across my soaked skin, turning the water from melted ice into a thin layer of frost. I was so cold I coldn’t feel my hands, but I was alive. That had to count for something.
I wiped the frost from my lashes, trying to wipe away the endless white. Was I blind now? I thought blindness meant dark, but shapes merged from the endless white. I wasn’t blind, but everywhere around me was snow and ice and endless gray skies.
There was no variation in the endless expanse of frozen nothing. No shelter. No warmth. No signs of life anywhere in the wasteland surrounding me. Nothing but endless, freezing cold white.
I'd escaped the ice tomb only to freeze to death here. Slower. More aware. But dead all the same. My arms shook with the effort as I tried to push myself up, muscles screaming in protest. They gave out halfway. I collapsed back into the snow, the impact jarring through my bruised spine.
Sensation faded. Into my bones. Into places I hadn't known could feel temperature. My body was shutting down again, just slower than before.
Hypothermia instead of whatever had been happening in the ice. I searched for my friends. My ghosts but my mind was empty. There were no more gentle reassurances. No more touches that weren’t real. I was alone. Again.
They were only imaginings anyway. Hallucinations born from trauma. Nothing real. Nothing I should mourn losing but the emptiness ached anyway. Just my luck that the first people I’d let in were imaginary.
Just as my eyelids were closing and the darkness reached for me, a figure appeared through the white. Male. Tall. Long Hair, bundled against the cold in bulky white furs. Walking toward me through the snow with ease that said this frozen hell was home to him. And he was walking straight for me.
I had to run. Fight. Do anything except lie here waiting for whatever came next but my body refused to obey. I couldn’t stay awake. My eyes drifted closed despite every instinct screaming to stay alert.
My eyes snapped open when a soft thump sounded next to me. The male crouched over me.
Blue. His skin was blue. Not pale or sickly but a rich mid-blue like twilight given form. The color shouldn't have been beautiful but it was. His ears came to sharp points visible through the navy hair that fell past his shoulders. Longer than any human male would wear it. The strands moved with the wind, revealing more of that impossible skin, those sharp cheekbones.
Thick lashes framed his intense eyes. His features were angular, elegant, the kind of face that belonged in paintings or dreams. Beautiful in that dangerous way. He was otherworldly. Perfect. The thought snapped into place with terrifying clarity.
Fae.
He was fae.
Fae couldn't be on Earth. The barriers between our worlds had been sealed for a millenia, after King Cedar turned his back on all of humankind. Had he been hiding here all this time? Since the barriers closed? How many others of his kind were here, concealed in the frozen wasteland where no one would look?
"I have you." His voice was deep. Accented. He bundled me up in similar thick white furs he wore, sliding his arms beneath me and lifting me from the snow like I weighed nothing. "You're safe now."
Safe. That word again. This time from a creature that shouldn't exist.
I should demand answers. Should do anything except let him carry me away from wherever the hell where I'd come from.
But I couldn't. My body had given up the fight, leaving me limp in his arms while he held me against his chest. The heat from him bled through my soaked clothes. Warmer than any human. My frozen skin drank it in even as my mind tried to process what he was.
"My shelter isn't far," he said, his voice dropping to a low murmur that vibrated through his chest into mine. "I'll get you warm. Give you dry clothes. Food." His accent thickened on certain words, making them sound lyrical. "You're going to be all right. I promise you."
The words blurred together. Shelter. Warmth. Safety. Promises I had no reason to believe. Meaning slid away before I could grasp it, lost in the haze of exhaustion and cold and the impossible reality of being held by a fae male who shouldn't exist.
I must have drifted off, because when I pried open my eyes we walked through tall trees. Ice and snow weighed down the dark green needles and the scent of fresh pine filled my lungs. We were in a forest, not unlike the wolves' territory, but the trees weren’t exactly the same. They were too tall. Too thick. The sheltered us from the freezing wind that had whipped me on the ice field. The cold stayed brutal but at least it wasn't trying to flay the skin from my bones with every gust.
The male looked down at me and a smile quirked his lips. “Glad to see you awake again.”
“I’m glad I woke again,” I managed and blinked at his blazing smile.
He walked us deeper into the forest. The trees grew closer together. Their branches tangled overhead, creating a canopy that blocked some of the gray light. The shadows made the cold feel different. Heavier. More present.
Little purple lights flickered between the trees. I saw them from the corner of my eye first. Thought I'd imagined them bobbing through the shadows. They wove between branches and drifted closer to us. The purple glow pulsed gently, brightening and dimming in a rhythm that reminded me of breathing.
“They’re faeries. They’ll lure you into the forest if you let them.” His bass voice vibrated into me.
“Faeires?” There were no faeries I knew of. “They’re not glow worms?”
“We don’t have glow worms here.”
The lights wove around each other in patterns that looked deliberate. Playful, almost. Like they were dancing through the shadows just to see what we would do.
The male shouted at them. Not words I understood. The language was harsh, guttural, full of sounds that scraped against my ears. But I didn't need to know the words to understand the tone. Vicious. Sharp enough to cut. Violence wrapped in language and thrown at these faeries.
The lights winked out and vanished into the shadows so fast it was like they'd never been there. My heart hammered against my ribs, fear spiking through the exhaustion.
That flash of cruelty had been real. This male had violence in him. Close to the surface. Ready to be used.
His gaze dropped to me and the change on his face unsettled me. His brow was smooth and a ready smile quirked his full lips. "They’re pests and if you don’t yell at them, they’ll stick around. They feast on dead flesh, so they lure people into the cold and wait for them to die. I’ll protect you from them. They won't bother us any more."
His voice had gone gentle again. Like the violence hadn't happened. But it had. I knew what I’d seen in many men before. I needed to be careful around this male.
I kept my expression neutral. Didn't let the fear show on my face.
"Thank you." The words tasted like ash. Like lies. But I forced them out anyway because that's what you did when you were weak and needed someone who might hurt you to keep thinking you were harmless. Grateful. Not a threat.
A hut appeared through the trees. Small. Rough-hewn wood that looked weathered by time and cold, half buried beneath snow and ice. Smoke rose from a stone chimney. The promise of warmth after so much cold and dying was overwhelming.
It was also convenient.
How did this male find me? He looked like he lived in the forest, and by the time he’d found me, I’d been half buried in snow in the middle of an iced over tundra stretched horizon to horizon. How did he find me at the precise moment I needed rescue.
There might be a reasonable answer, but I was at his whim. I couldn't afford to anger him. Not when the alternative was freezing to death in a forest of dead trees without any idea where I was.
The male opened the door. Heat spilled around us as he brought me inside. The temperature difference was so extreme it hurt. My face burned. My fingers screamed as blood rushed back into extremities that had been numb for too long.
The interior was simple. A single room with a fire crackling in a stone hearth. Shelves lined with jars and dried herbs whose names I didn't know. Everything tidy. Orderly. Nothing out of place. Furs piled on a low bed in the corner. One bed.
He set me on my feet. I put my hand on the wall to steady myself as he turned to close the door. We were sealed in together now. He turned to face me. His expression was kind. Concerned. Everything about him screamed helpful. Like he was everything he appeared to be but I'd seen that flash of cruelty. That hadn't been my imagination.
“Thank you. For rescuing me,” I said. Careful. Polite.
He shook his head as though walking calf deep through snow and carrying me back here was nothing. “I’m glad I found you in time.”
“And how did you find me?” I swallowed hard but kept myself steady. I needed to know and I’d be looking for the lie.
"I heard the ice breaking." His accent softened the words. "Sound carries differently here. Everything echoes. I was checking my traps when I heard the crack. It was pretty loud, you know. I've lived here long enough to know what ice sounds like when it breaks. I went to investigate.” His jaw tightened. "By the time I reached the plateau, I found you lying in the snow. I thought I was too late. Then I saw you breathing."
“You have traps out here?” I asked.
"For food," he said, his tone matter-of-fact. "Rabbits. Sometimes fox. Anything that's learned to survive in the cold." He glanced toward the shelves lined with jars and dried herbs. "You learn to use everything out here. Fur. Bone. Meat. It's not much of a life. But it's survival. I’m just glad I found you."
His gaze returned to me. "What's your name?"
I should give him nothing real but my thoughts were too scattered to invent a believable story. And I would have to have my full wits about me if I gave him a false name and didn't answer when he called me. I settled on the truth. "Lyriana."
His smile widened. Approval flickered across his handsome features.
"What's yours?" I asked. Fair was fair. If he had my name, I deserved his.
"Kieran." The name rolled off his tongue easily. "It means 'dark one' in the old language."
That’s a… strange thing to tell me. People usually don’t go around telling others the meaning of their names, but then again, he isn’t human.
I licked my chafed lips, needing to understand where I was. How I was going to find a path away. "Where are we? What is this place?"
Confusion crossed his face. His brow furrowed, those dark eyes studying me like I'd asked something absurd. "We're in Faerie." He tilted his head. "Where did you think you were?"
Faerie. Not Earth. Not some frozen corner of the world I'd been thrown to.
Faerie.
I was in Faerie.
Trigger Warning
COMING SOON
MAGIC CAPIVE COMING SOON