Chapter 5: Mine

Jason gave me a few minutes alone to prepare before the ceremony would continue — his ceremony now, apparently, whether I’d agreed to it or not, the decision already made somewhere over my head between two men who’d never once thought to ask what I wanted.

The private room felt smaller than it had that morning, crowded with the weight of everything that had just unraveled. Virginia, my stepsister, paced the length of it with barely contained fury, heels clicking sharp against the stone floor, while Miranda stood pale and silent near the window, looking more shaken than I’d ever seen her, arms wrapped tightly around herself like she was trying to hold something in.

“Why her?” Virginia’s voice cracked with jealousy she didn’t bother hiding, whirling on me with an expression twisted somewhere between disbelief and outrage. “Sherwood wanted her. Fine. Whatever. But now the Supreme Alpha wants her too? What does she even have that the rest of us don’t?”

I didn’t answer. There wasn’t a version of that question I could survive answering honestly, not without unraveling everything I’d learned in a life none of them remembered living through.

Virginia crossed the room in three sharp steps and slapped me hard enough to snap my head sideways, my cheek blazing with pain, stars bursting briefly across my vision.

Before I could even recover, my stepmother joined in, shoving me hard enough that I stumbled and fell against the vanity, knocking a hairbrush clattering to the floor.

My father stood in the doorway, watching. He didn’t stop them. He never had, not in either of my lives, and something about that consistency hurt worse than either blow.

“You’ll marry Jason whether you like it or not,” he said instead, flat and final, like the decision had never once belonged to me in either of my lives.

Something inside me finally broke all the way open. I pressed a hand to my burning cheek and whispered, barely audible even to myself, “Moon Goddess. Please. Let me die again.”

I didn’t realize Jason had already returned until his voice cut through the room, low and lethal, silencing every whispered accusation and every shuffling footstep at once.

“Every word.” He stepped fully into the doorway, his eyes sweeping over Virginia, my stepmother, my father, cataloging each of them like a predator assessing which one to strike first. “I heard every single word spoken in this room.”

He crossed the room slowly, and two silver daggers appeared in his hands so fast I barely saw him draw them, the blades catching the afternoon light streaming through the window. One settled beneath Virginia’s chin — a warning, apparently, extended to everyone present regardless of guilt, punishment for crimes she hadn’t technically committed yet in this timeline. The other pressed lightly against my stepmother’s throat, just enough to draw a thin line of fear across her face, her breath catching audibly in the sudden silence.

His voice dropped to something terrifyingly calm, the kind of calm that belonged to men who never needed to raise their voice to be obeyed.

“Touch my Luna again, and there won’t be enough left of you to bury.”

“No!” I rushed forward before I could think better of it, grabbing his arm, some instinct overriding every ounce of caution I should have had toward a man capable of drawing blades that fast. “Please, don’t.”

The violence in his expression softened the instant he looked at me, something in his gaze shifting entirely, gentler than I thought a man like him was capable of.

He knelt in front of me, checking the mark on my cheek with fingers far more careful than I expected. “Did they hurt you?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

He rose, took my hand in his without asking permission, and led me back toward the altar, my wedding gown trailing behind me across marble floors that had already claimed my life once today, though he had no way of knowing that.

The guests stood frozen in stunned silence as we passed, no one daring to whisper, no one daring to so much as shift in their seats.

The cathedral doors sealed shut behind us with a sound like finality itself, an audible click that seemed to echo far longer than it should have.

No one was leaving.

The Elder’s hands shook as he found his place again, his voice trembling despite his best efforts to steady it. “Shall — shall we continue the ceremony?” He cleared his throat, forcing steadiness into his voice that clearly hadn’t fully returned. “We are gathered here to witness the marriage between Supreme Alpha Jason Salford and Bella Papson of this pack.”

Jason didn’t wait for him to finish.

“I do,” he said, then turned toward me, answering for me too before I’d found my own voice. “And she does as well.”

He dropped to one knee, sliding a diamond ring onto my trembling hand before the Elder had even reached that part of the ceremony, the stone catching the light like it had been cut specifically to blind anyone who dared to look away from this moment.

His eyes flickered gold, wolf bleeding into his gaze as he rose and pulled me against him, one hand splayed possessively against my waist, the other still curled protectively around mine.

“My Luna,” he said, and then his mouth was on mine, deep and consuming, before the Elder could finish a single blessing, before I’d even fully processed that I was being married for the second time in a single day, to a man whose name I hadn’t known until an hour ago.

Against my lips, low enough that only I could hear it, he murmured the words that sealed my fate for the second time that day, a whisper meant for no one but me, private even in a room full of witnesses.

“You are mine.”