The Weight of My Own Corpse

Brandon's hand clamps around the back of my neck, and the world tilts.

      "Please." The word comes out wet and broken. Behind us, the perimeter wall is gone, peeled open like cardboard, and the feral tide pours through the gap. Skinless wolves, hundreds of them. Their breath reaches me before their claws do, a rotten copper stink that coats my tongue.

     "You healed everyone else." Brandon's voice is calm, and that is the worst part. He sounds like a man ordering lunch. "Heal this."

     Chloe presses against his side, her fingers laced through his. "Hurry, baby," she says. "They're so close."

I scream his name. He answers by throwing me.

      My back hits the mud. For three seconds, I watch my mate run with his arm around his mistress, her ruby necklace bouncing against her collarbone. My mother's ruby.

Then the first jaws find my throat.

      Teeth punch through my throat, and the impact echoes inside my skull. Blood sprays across a snout as wide as my torso, and the last thing I see is the red moon, fat and bruised, watching like it paid for the show.

I wake up screaming.

     The sound rips off the basement walls and slams back into my ears. Both hands fly to my throat. Skin. Whole. My fingers shake as they search for the hole that should be there. I loved a man who threw me away in three seconds, and the memory makes me want to scrub my skin raw.

No blood, no teeth, nothing tearing. Only a lumpy mattress on a concrete floor and the smell of damp laundry.

     I snatch the cracked phone off the milk crate beside my bed. The screen throws a sickly blue glare across my knuckles.

October 20, 2026. 2:02 PM.

    Exactly sixty days stand between me and the red moon, and at the end of them waits the man who feeds me to the horde.

      Tonight is the Crescent Ridge alliance banquet. In my last life, he dragged me onto a stage that same night and announced our mating to two hundred guests. By midnight, his teeth were in my shoulder, and he treated my blood like an account he could drain whenever he pleased.

    I stare at my hands. Chemical burns from the silver polish crust my fingertips, and every nail is cracked to the quick. These are the hands of a servant who never learned she could say no.

For six years, I hoped he would look at me like a person. I hoped until the mud. Nothing has grown back where that hope used to be, and I am not sure I want it to.

    My right thumb finds my left wrist and rubs the faint red lines of the pack mark. The skin there runs warm. It always does when he thinks about me.

Anger rises in me, slow and steady, and it does not shake. For years, my anger came out as tears. Now it sits in my gut like a loaded gun.

     I drag a sock from under the mattress and count what is inside. Sixty-three dollars, folded small. No weapon, no allies, no plan. Only a memory of exactly how the world ends and who sells me to it.

That is enough to start with.

     I know which banks freeze first and which highways jam by sunrise. Every secret they will pay for with their lives sits in my head, and no one has thought to ask what I know.

A boot slams into my door, and the flimsy frame shudders.

     "Wake your lazy ass up, omega!"

Chloe. Her voice is a rusty nail dragged down glass.

     "Brandon came back from the border with a shredded shoulder," she says. "You are going to crawl to the training hall, get on your knees, and bleed into a cup until he stops whining. Then you will press my dress. If there is one wrinkle in it, I will have Garrick lock you in the cellar again."

The cellar. A concrete box with no window and a ceiling low enough to touch. Three nights in there once, and I clawed my own fingernails off against the door. My lungs tighten just hearing the word.

      I breathe through it. In. Out. Slow.

"Are you deaf?" Another kick rattles the hinges. "You worthless little blood bag. Nobody wants you here. Brandon keeps you around because you leak medicine, and the second that stops, you are dog food. Ten minutes. He expects you downstairs in ten minutes."

I rise from the mattress. My knees pop in the silence, and the sound seems absurdly loud.

     "Tell him I'm coming," I say.

My voice comes out smooth. It is a stranger's voice, and I like her.

"For the last time."

      A pause stretches on the other side of the wood. Then Chloe laughs, sharp and delighted.

"Aww, look at you. Growing a mouth." Her heels click closer. "Do not get cute tonight. After the toast, Brandon announces the mating to the Coalition envoys. You will smile, then say thank you. And you will wear the white dress, or I swear I will skin that attitude off you myself, you ungrateful little slut."

    I cross the room in four steps and open the door.

Chloe stands in the narrow corridor in a silk robe, her red-nailed hands on her hips, her blonde curls arranged just so. Her smirk is the same one she wore while she ran. The same one she wore while holding his hand.

     Her eyes meet mine, and the smirk slips a fraction. Maybe she expected red eyes and a bowed head. She gets neither.

Then my gaze drops to her throat, and everything in me stops.

     A ruby the size of a thumbnail hangs on a thin gold chain. I know it's cut. I know the tiny chip near the clasp, left when my mother dropped it on the kitchen floor when I was seven. She laughed, scooped it up, and kissed my forehead. I would trade the world to hear that laugh once more.

    "Pretty, isn't it?" Chloe lifts it with two fingers and turns it in the light. "Brandon found it in the family vault after your mother's accident. He said a dead woman has no use for jewelry."

Accident.

     The word sinks into my stomach. Eleven years of grief, and beneath it, something sharper: a reason to question the story.

     My mother died in a car fire eleven years ago, on an empty mountain road, and the pack sealed the file within a day. I spent my whole last life believing it was bad luck. Brandon's father signed the report. Brandon himself stood at the grave and held my hand.

     I keep my expression flat and polite, the way a servant is expected to.

     On my left wrist, the faded pack mark gives one slow, deliberate pulse, as if something beneath it has heard her.