Chapter 3: I Don’t

The walk down the aisle felt endless.

Every step brought me closer to the man standing at the altar, smiling like the perfect groom he’d spent three years convincing everyone he was. Handsome. Composed. Beloved by every pack elder in the room, each of whom had spent the last hour toasting our future happiness like it was already guaranteed.

Only I knew what waited beneath that smile — the calculation, the cruelty, the plan to murder my father the moment I signed away everything that made me valuable to him.

I studied his face as I approached, searching for some flicker of the monster I now knew lived beneath it, but he wore his mask as flawlessly as he always had.

I forced myself to keep breathing, to keep walking, my father’s arm rigid beneath my hand, utterly unaware that I already knew exactly what he’d promised away behind my back, though not yet to whom.

Every guest we passed offered warm smiles and murmured congratulations, none of them suspecting for a single moment that the bride walking so calmly past them had already died once at this very man’s hands, in a version of today that no longer existed anywhere but in my own memory.

The Elder began the ceremony, his voice carrying easily through the pack cathedral’s high stone arches, the same words I’d heard recited at a dozen weddings before this one, words that had always sounded beautiful until I understood exactly what they were about to bind me to.

I barely heard any of it. My mind kept replaying Sherwood’s voice from a life that technically hadn’t happened yet, at least not in this timeline. Once we kill Alpha, the pack is mine. I glanced sideways at my father, standing proud and oblivious in the front row, utterly unaware that the man he’d chosen for me intended to end his life the moment the ink dried on our marriage contract.

“Do you, Bella —” the Elder began, his voice steady and formal.

“No.”

The word left me before I’d fully decided to say it, cutting through the Elder’s sentence and silencing the entire cathedral in an instant. My own voice sounded foreign to me, steadier than I felt, like some braver version of myself had finally stepped forward to speak on my behalf.

Gasps rippled through the pews. Somewhere behind me, my stepmother’s sharp intake of breath was audible even over the sudden roar of blood in my ears, and I could feel a hundred pairs of eyes swinging toward me at once, disbelief and scandal already spreading through the crowd like wildfire through dry grass.

Sherwood’s smile froze on his face, cracking at the edges the way ice does right before it shatters entirely.

I stepped backward, my hands trembling at my sides, tears streaming freely now that I’d finally let the truth out into the open air, six years of practiced composure crumbling away in an instant. “I don’t,” I said again, louder this time, steadier, my voice carrying to the very back of the cathedral. “I won’t marry you, Sherwood. Not this time. Not ever.”

Chaos erupted. Guests half-rose from their seats, murmuring, some outraged, some simply stunned, a few even beginning to whisper theories about what could possibly have driven the bride to such an unthinkable act at the very altar.

My stepmother’s voice rose above the din, shrill and mortified, already calculating the damage this would do to the family’s standing among the assembled Alphas.

Sherwood crossed the distance between us in two furious strides and grabbed my wrist, his fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, exactly the way they had in the life before this one.

“Stop embarrassing me.” His voice had dropped to the same low, dangerous register I remembered from the hallway outside the guest wing, the one that had preceded a marble pillar and a river current the first time around. This time, I refused to flinch away from it.

“I’m not embarrassing you, Sherwood.” I lifted my chin, meeting his furious gaze without looking away, refusing to let him see how much my heart was still hammering beneath the surface of my sudden courage. “I’m saving my father’s life. Whether you understand that or not.”

Confusion flickered across his face for just a moment, quickly buried beneath renewed anger, but it was enough. Enough to know some small part of him wondered how I could possibly have guessed.

Before I could answer, before I could even try to pull free, the cathedral doors exploded inward with a force that rattled the stained glass windows above us, sending shards of colored light skittering across the stone floor like scattered jewels.

Black-armored guards flooded through the entrance, moving with a discipline that made the pack’s own security look like children playing dress-up.

The crowd parted instantly, terror and awe crossing every face at once, chairs scraping back, someone’s champagne glass shattering unnoticed on the floor, the scent of crushed lilies rising from the wreckage of the overturned floral arrangements near the doors.

Heavy boots echoed against the stone floor, each footstep landing with the weight of absolute authority, and a deep male voice cut through the chaos like a blade.

“She already answered.”

Every head in the cathedral turned toward the doors, my father included, his face draining of what little color remained in it.

I didn’t know the man standing there yet, but something in the room already did — I could feel it in the way every Alpha present dropped their eyes, in the way even my own father’s shoulders curled inward with something close to fear, in the way the very air in the cathedral seemed to still itself in deference to whoever had just arrived.

Whoever he was, his presence alone had accomplished in seconds what nothing I’d said or done had managed at all — silence, total and absolute, blanketing the entire cathedral.

“I’m here for my bride.”