Chapter 1

After his fated mate died, Alpha Killian Thorne spent ten years resenting me.

I was the Omega healer he never chose—bound to him by duty, not love.

A substitute. A scar on a bond neither of us asked for.

No matter how deeply I healed his wounds, no matter how quietly I stayed by his side, all he ever said was:

“If you really want to please me, Clara… then disappear.”

But when death came charging, it wasn’t I who fell.

He did.

Bleeding out in my arms, Killian looked at me one last time and whispered:

“If only I’d never met you…”

At the funeral, his mother wept.

“He should’ve been with Selena. I never should’ve let him mate with you.”

His father’s glare cut through me.

“Killian saved you three times. Why wasn’t it you in that grave?”

Everyone regretted that he had bonded with me.

Even I did, too.

I was cast out of the pack with nothing.

No title.

No Luna severance.

No den to call my own.

And then… perhaps the Moon Goddess took pity on me.

She gave me one final chance to rewrite fate.

This time, I won’t beg for his love.

This time, I won’t tether him to pain.

This time, I’ll sever the bond before it begins.

Even if it shatters what’s left of me.

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A blinding light burst from the hands of the Moon Goddess.

I squeezed my eyes shut, but Killian Thorne’s voice sliced through the brilliance like a blade.

“My parents threatened to die if I didn’t mate with you. Clara, you’re really something. But even if we complete the bond—what do you think you’ll get out of it? You really think we’ll be happy?”

I snapped my eyes open.

And there he was—Killian, Alpha of the Thorne Pack, alive and breathing, standing right in front of me.

He looked younger than I remembered. Less hardened. But the disdain in his eyes hadn’t changed.

My throat tightened, but I forced back the sob.

The Moon Goddess had truly answered my plea. She’d sent me back—not to the day we first met, but to the day we were supposed to complete our bond. Ten years ago.

Thank the stars. There was still time.

I stared at him, memorizing every inch of him like a starving wolf. I’d begged the Moon for this chance—not to win him, but to set him free.

“Killian, you don’t want to bond with me because the one you truly love… is Selena, isn’t it?”

His smirk faltered. His jaw tightened.

“So what if it is?” he said coldly. “We’re already standing at the Bond Council Registry. What now, you think you can still back out?”

I nodded. “I do.”

He laughed bitterly. “I don’t have time for games. Just sign the damn contract. I’ll be outside.”

He turned and walked away.

Pain bloomed in my chest. But I had already felt worse—in a future where he died because of me.

In both lifetimes, I had loved him deeply.

He saved me three times, and I thought—naively—that meant something.

Even his parents believed so. “Killian’s heart is hard on the outside, soft on the inside,” they once told me. “If he didn’t care, why would he risk his life for you?”

And I had believed them. I entered our mating with fragile hope.

Then Selena died, and everything changed. The Alpha who once shielded me now looked at me like I was the one who’d buried her.

His last words before he died for me still echoed:

“If only I’d never met you.”

They say the Moon Goddess rarely interferes in the fate of wolves.

But that night, beneath a blood moon and a sky split with silence,

when grief hollowed my chest and I had nothing left but regret—

she came.

No words.

Just light.

A silver glow gathered in her hands and drifted into mine—

warm, pulsing, ancient.

The Moon’s Time Key.

It shimmered with power I couldn’t understand, only feel.

The moment my fingers closed around it, the world held its breath.

Before dawn, I climbed the mountain trail to the forgotten temple.

The old priestess was already waiting.

Her eyes—clouded with age and moonlight—looked right through me.

“Before you turn the key,” she said,

“you must understand the price.”

I said nothing.

I had already lost everything.

She took my hand. Her voice was barely a whisper:

“If you wish to sever the mate bond without death…

you must fulfill his three deepest regrets.”

Her words struck like stones sinking into deep, dark water.

“Only then,” she said, “will fate let you go free.”

But as her fingers let go of mine, she added—so soft I almost missed it:

“The Moon never grants anything without balance, child.

What she gives… she may one day reclaim.”

And so, with nothing left but a prayer in my lungs,

I turned the key.