Elena's POV

"Miss?" A voice very close to my ear. Deep and deliberate. "Can you hear me? Can you squeeze my hand at all?"

Voices pulled me up from somewhere far below. My body felt completely foreign and heavy.

I tried to move my fingers, but nothing responded.

Another voice from farther off came, flat and brisk: "Don't waste your energy, Marcus. Her brain activity has been barely registering for months. Change the IV bag and let's get to room 406."

Months.

The word struck something in me like a match striking flint.

My eyes opened.

I saw a white ceiling, cold fluorescent light, and a steady, rhythmic beeping somewhere to my left. The doctor standing beside the bed went completely still the moment our eyes connected. He stared at me for exactly two seconds. Then his clipboard hit the tile floor and he turned and ran out of the room.

"She's awake! Get the chief of surgery, room 402 is awake!"

I swallowed. My throat was dry as chalk. My arms were heavy with tubes and wires, and when I tried to lift my hand it moved slowly, like learning the motion for the first time.

"Where am I?" My voice barely qualified as a voice. 

The remaining doctor stepped quickly to my side, penlight moving between my eyes. "St. Jude Medical Complex. Please don't try to sit up. You were brought in after a very severe accident."

The memories came in pieces, each one landing separately. The ceremony. The recording. Caleb on his knees at the altar, his hands grabbing the hem of my gown. My feet on the front steps and the cold morning air and the black SUV appearing around the bend of the mountain road too fast to stop.

"How long?" I asked.

He paused. 

"Your injuries from the impact were catastrophic," he said carefully. "Your heart stopped twice on the operating table. We induced a medically supervised coma to protect your brain. But when we withdrew the sedatives after the initial recovery period, your body didn't wake up. You remained under." He held my gaze steadily. "Elena. You have been unconscious for an entire year."

A year?.

The vow renewal had been twelve months ago. Caleb had been living his life, while I was in this bed?. The merger had gone through. The pack had moved on. The whole world had simply continued without pausing to notice I was missing from it.

"My husband …" The word tasted wrong even as I said it. "Caleb. Has he …"

"He remarried."

The voice came from the far corner of the room. I hadn't known anyone else was there.

A man stepped out of the shadow near the tall window and moved into the light. He was tall with sharp, precise features and silver-gray eyes that absorbed everything around him.

He crossed to my bedside without hurrying, reached into his jacket, produced a slim black tablet, tapped it once, and held it toward me without a word.

The screen showed a ceremony I recognized immediately. The same hall, the same altar. Caleb was standing at the front looking luminous. Beside him in an enormous white gown with a diamond headpiece was Victoria. She was laughing as he slid the ring onto her finger.

Then the footage cut to an interview. Caleb on a leather sofa, hands clasped, a look of grief arranged on his face. A handkerchief near one eye.

"It has been a devastating year for the Bloodmoon Pack. Losing my beloved Elena in that tragic accident nearly broke me completely. But the pack needed a Luna, and Victoria has been my source of strength throughout this grief. I know that Elena, wherever she is, would want us to be strong."

The man turned the tablet off.

I lay there and felt a slow, thorough wave of nausea build from my chest to my throat. He had told them I was dead. He had reframed my public rejection of him as a tragic accident, packaged himself as a grieving widower, and married my stepsister in the same hall where I had thrown his ring at his cheekbone.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Lucien De Villiers."

The name landed with its own weight. The Midnight Crest Pack. The oldest bloodline in the western territories. His family name appeared in texts that predated most of the current packs by centuries.

"Caleb is my stepbrother," he said flatly. 

"He never mentioned a brother."

"He wouldn't have." Lucien pulled the chair beside my bed closer and sat, his elbows resting on his knees, eyes level with mine. "Caleb is a bastard son. He has no legitimate legal claim to the Alpha title of the Bloodmoon Pack. He has always known this. He also knew that marrying into your bloodline, your mother's wealth, your family's political connections, the legitimacy that your name alone would give him with the council — was the only way to hold his position. So he engineered a marriage."

I was quiet. The pieces were assembling themselves, each one clicking into place.

"I spent the past year going through his financial records," Lucien continued. “Contracts signed before your wedding that were never intended to see daylight." He paused. "Elena. The car accident that took your parents three years ago. The investigation concluded it was wet roads and brake failure."

Something cold moved through me. "Yes," I said slowly.

"The brakes were severed. Caleb arranged it. He had it done before he ever introduced himself to you."

The room went very quiet.

The heart monitor beside me began to accelerate.

My mother had called me an hour before the crash. She was laughing at something my father had said in the car. I told her I loved her and said I would see them soon and hung up the phone, and I never spoke to her again.

"He murdered them," I said. My voice was completely flat. 

"To clear the path. With your parents gone you had no one to negotiate on your behalf, no one to examine the marriage contract closely, no protector of any kind. He positioned himself as your only source of support and made sure you were entirely dependent on him before the ring ever went on your finger."

I stared at the white ceiling.

Three years. For three years, I had loved him. I defended him when people tried to warn me. 

"When he finds out I'm alive, he'll also try to…."

"He won't recognize you."

Lucien reached over and picked up the small mirror from the nightstand. He held it up in front of my face and simply waited.

I turned my head and looked.

For several long seconds I did not understand what I was seeing.

The face in the glass was not mine. The soft, round features I had lived in my entire life were simply gone. The crash had destroyed the underlying bone structure of my face, and the months of reconstructive surgery had rebuilt it from the foundation up. What looked back at me now had sharp, high cheekbones, a clean angular jaw, a straight nose, full lips. A face that was striking. I was beautiful in a way that had absolutely nothing in common with the woman I used to be.

I raised a trembling hand and pressed my fingers to my own cheek.

"The medical records have been altered," Lucien said quietly. "Your name does not appear anywhere in this hospital's system. As far as every database in the territory is concerned, Elena of the Bloodmoon Pack died at the scene of a hit-and-run accident one year ago. You are a ghost."

I lowered my hand slowly.

For the three years I had wasted on a man who had been counting down to my usefulness expiring, for the face I would never see in a mirror again. But underneath the grief, something else was forming. 

I looked at Lucien De Villiers.

"Why?" I asked. "Why do all of this? You could have taken the evidence to the council and destroyed him without ever coming near this room."

Something moved through those silver eyes. "Because I don't want him disgraced," he said. "I want him destroyed. I want him to watch his life be taken apart piece by piece, slowly enough to understand exactly what's happening, unable to stop a single thing."

He stood and extended his hand toward me. 

"You want your life back. I want my brother destroyed." Something appeared at the corner of his mouth that wasn't quite a smile. "Marry me. And together, we take everything from him."