1: Reborn

FREYA'S POV

"Kai... Talia..."

The ward was hot and airless, thick with bleach and old sweat. I sat slumped in the wheelchair by the barred window, my eyes fixed on nothing, my hair gone white though I wasn't yet thirty-four.

On the television bolted high in the corner, cameras were crowded ten deep outside Redwood Manor. Alpha Kade Redwood was marrying his mate at last, his one true love, the reporters kept saying, breathless. Ivy Mercer, radiant in white, holding his arm like she'd always belonged there.

I don't know when I got to my feet. I only know I was screaming.

"Give me back my children! Kade! Give me back my children!"

Crack!

The nurse's hand caught me across the face before I finished the sentence. "Behave yourself."

I held my burning cheek and lifted my chin anyway. "I am Kade Redwood's mate. The Everhart heir. Let me out! Let me go find my children—"

She spat at my feet. "Look at yourself. A wolf who can't even shift, calling herself a Luna. Keep howling and I'll put you in the isolation room."

The lock clicked from the outside.

On the screen, Kade looked at Ivy the way he used to look at the moon the night before a full shift, like she was the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth. Forty and somehow only more devastating for it, the kind of Alpha half the unmated wolves in the country still dreamed about.

The reporter was narrating their love story like a fairy tale, sweethearts since school, torn apart by circumstance, found their way back after twenty long years.

No one remembered me. No one remembered the wolf who'd stood beside Kade Redwood through every border war, every power struggle, every year he clawed his way toward the Alpha King's favor.

I remembered, though. I remembered the night three years ago when he threw the divorce papers at my feet, his lip curled in disgust. "Ivy is the one I've always loved. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't have lost so many years with her."

We'd been promised to each other as pups. I'd given up my birthright in the Everhart pack for him. I'd borne his children. I'd swallowed what was left of my pride the day he told the whole pack council I'd gone dormant. A wolf who couldn't shift, an embarrassment he was ashamed to call his Luna.

He'd risen to power on my back, then wrapped his arm around Ivy Mercer in front of everyone who mattered.

And what did I get? Three years locked in a human hospital, sedated so heavily I couldn't hold my own name most days. My twins died in a rogue attack on the north border, and before their bodies were even in the ground, Kade was already choosing Ivy's wedding colors.

You don't know yet, do you, Freya? Kade let the rogues through the border himself. He needed your children gone so there'd be nothing left tying him to you.

Your daughter was calling for her mother when she died. She never knew her mother had been rotting in a human ward the whole time.

"The title of Luna was always meant to be mine. You stole it. It's time you gave it back."

Ivy had said that to my face three days ago, smiling the whole time.

I tasted copper in the back of my throat, my eyes still locked on the two of them smiling for the cameras.

If I get another chance at this life, I will not make the same mistakes.

"Freya? Freya?"

A boy's voice, familiar and worried, cut through the fog.

I felt like I was drowning — my chest crushed under an impossible weight — until something warm pressed against my mouth and air rushed down my throat. My eyes flew open.

"Cough — cough—" Water spilled from my throat.

"Freya! You were fine one second ago, how did you end up in the pool?!"

A girl's voice, frightened, spoke close to my ear.

I blinked, disoriented. Pool? What pool?

I looked down at my hands and found not the swollen, sedated hands of a woman in her thirties but small, soft, unscarred ones. A girl's hands.

Is this... me, back at Lincoln Prep?

I looked around. Sunlight. Chlorine. The training pool at the academy where every pack's wealthiest, most powerful pups were sent to learn control before their first shift.

I'd been reborn.

"What else would've knocked her in? She was probably staring at Kade swimming again."

A cluster of girls laughed nearby, not bothering to lower their voices.

Not far off, Kade stood at the pool's edge in nothing but swim trunks. Seventeen and already built like the Alpha he was born to become. Shoulders broad, a hard stomach, the kind of cold, striking face that turned heads whether he wanted it to or not.

My stomach turned at the sight of him.

Kade Redwood. Still the center of every room without even trying.

Who would guess that underneath all that golden-boy shine was a wolf who'd let his own children die just to marry someone else.

I thought of my twins, and my hands curled into fists.

You will pay for what you do to me in this life, Kade Redwood. I promise you that.

He must have heard the girls talking, because his jaw tightened and he turned and walked off without a word.

"Don't say that. Freya isn't like that." Ivy sounded genuinely wounded.

The moment I recognized her, the memories of my past life slammed back into place.

In my last life, I'd put on eight at the academy, and it had eaten away at whatever confidence I had. People looked at me differently. Only Ivy stayed close, always the one to defend me when the others turned cruel.

She was beautiful in that soft, effortless way that made everyone want to protect her. I used to think it was kindness.

I hadn't known yet that it was a mask, built to get her closer to Kade.

And the reason it had to be me, specifically? Because I was the girl Kade had been promised to since birth.

Back then, Ivy had built her gentle, golden reputation at Lincoln Prep using me as the backdrop. The awkward, unremarkable girl she so generously tolerated.

She was doing it again, right now. She laid a hand over mine, all concern. "Freya, did you come to the pool because you wanted to lose weight?"

Everyone laughed the second they saw sweet Ivy smoothing things over for pathetic little me.

"She's gotten so big. She could swim laps till she drowns and Kade still wouldn't look twice."

Ivy flushed like she was embarrassed on my behalf and pulled me up by the arm. "Don't listen to them. I'll teach you to swim myself. You'll slim down in no time, and Kade will finally notice you."

I pulled my hand out from under hers, and her smile flickered.

I hadn't forgotten that in my last life, she'd used this exact excuse to humiliate me in front of the entire academy.

"No."

My voice came out flat. Ivy's fingers clamped around my wrist instead, and she pouted like I'd wounded her. "Freya... what did I do wrong?"

"Ivy was only trying to help. How could you be so ungrateful?" Her voice was sweet and innocent.

"After everything she's done for you, you deserve to stay fat forever."

"Ivy, let's go. It's her choice whether she swims or not."

A few girls stepped in and pulled Ivy back.

I watched them fawn over her, cold all the way through. Ivy wasn't popular just because she was pretty and sharp in her classes. It was the bloodline everyone assumed she had.

Lincoln Prep was the most exclusive academy in the territory, reserved for the sons and daughters of the strongest packs. Because Ivy carried the Mercer name, everyone assumed she was the Mercer Alpha's daughter, heir to one of the wealthiest packs on this side of the Alpha King's territory.

What none of them knew — what I'd only learned by accident in my last life — was that the real Mercer heir was someone else entirely. Ivy was the daughter of the Mercer pack's driver, quietly swapped in to attend the academy in the real heir's place because of her grades and the family's connections.

The true Mercer heir had been sent to study abroad years ago. I remembered her name from my last life, Wren Mercer.

I stepped forward before I could think better of it and caught Ivy's hand, forcing my face into something apologetic but let the wrong name slip anyway, watching her carefully as I said it.

"Wren — sorry, Ivy. I didn't mean anything by it. I'm just not myself today."