Chapter 1 — The Last Thing I Felt

Sandra’s POV

I always thought dying would feel like something.

Not necessarily pain  I’d heard people say it goes numb toward the end, that the body has a way of sparing you the worst of it. But I thought there’d be something. Some kind of weight to it. Some acknowledgment from the universe that a person was leaving.

There wasn’t. It was just cold. And then colder.

The Blood Ceremony had been loud all evening. Drums, fire, the whole pack pressed together in the valley below the Blackwood estate while the sky went dark above us. I’d stood near the back the way I always did. Close enough to belong, far enough not to pretend I did. Vanessa was near the front, obviously. White dress, hair down, the kind of beautiful that makes people forget what they were looking at before she walked in.

Zadok stood at the altar. I let myself look at him for exactly as long as felt safe and then I looked at the fire instead.

I’d gotten good at that. Measuring out how much of him I was allowed to want in a single evening and stopping before it became something I couldn’t swallow back down.

Six years. Six years of that particular discipline and I was still terrible at it.

I saw the figure before anyone else did. Hooded, moving wrong through the crowd too deliberate, too focused, cutting through the bodies with a kind of purpose that had nothing to do with ceremony. My eyes found Zadok automatically, the way they always did, and I saw it immediately — his back to the threat, head turned left, three of his guards pulled away to the other side of the valley.

Someone had planned this.

I don’t remember deciding to move. My body just went. Shoved through the last two people between me and Zadok and got there exactly one second before the blade did.

It went in between my ribs on the left side.

The sound I made wasn’t a scream. It was smaller than that  this short, surprised thing, like the pain caught me off guard even though I’d technically put myself in front of it. I felt Zadok’s arm catch me before I hit the ground but the impact still jarred through my whole body and then I was down, cheek against cold stone, trying to figure out why I couldn’t pull a full breath.

Wolfbane. I knew what it was almost immediately. It moved differently than regular pain  not sharp, not burning, just this slow crawling cold that spread outward from the wound like it owned me. Like it had been waiting for an opening.

“Sandra.” Zadok’s voice above me. His hands on my face, tilting it up. “Sandra, look at me.”

I looked at him. I couldn’t not.

He was afraid. Actually afraid, in a way I’d never seen on his face before, and some stupid part of me — the part that had loved him quietly for six years without asking for anything back — felt something warm move through the cold.

Maybe, I thought. Maybe this is it. Maybe this is the moment.

I know. I know how that sounds. I was dying on a stone floor and I was still doing it — still looking for proof that I meant something to him, still hoping the fear on his face was about me specifically and not just the chaos of the moment.

I couldn’t help it. Loving him had become the same as breathing a long time ago. I didn’t know how to stop even when I was running out of air.

The wolfbane kept spreading. My fingers had gone completely numb and the cold was moving up my side now, slow and patient, and I could feel myself getting heavier in a way that had nothing to do with weight.

Vanessa appeared.

She came from somewhere to the left and knelt beside Zadok and her hand went to his shoulder and I watched his body change — the tension shifting, something in him settling at her touch the way it never quite settled at mine. Even then. Even watching me bleed out on the ground.

They thought I was already gone. I could tell from the way their voices dropped, the way they stopped directing anything at me and started talking to each other. Like I was furniture. Like I was already somewhere they couldn’t reach.

I wasn’t.

I was still there. I was holding onto consciousness with everything I had left because something in me needed to hear it the real thing, the true thing, the version of the story they’d never say out loud if they thought I could hear.

Vanessa said something low that I couldn’t fully catch. His name, I think. The way she said his name was different from how anyone else said it.

And then Zadok said quietly, the way he said things he meant 

“She knew what she was to me, Vanessa. She always knew.”

The cold reached my chest.

I laid there and let it.

There was nothing left to fight for, was the thing. No maybe. No perhaps, no possibly, no version of this where I’d misread everything and he’d been secretly loving me back this whole time. Just that one sentence, said so calmly, like it was simply a fact about the world.

She knew what she was to me.

Something in me went very quiet.

Not sad , i was past sad. Not even angry, though maybe that would come later if there was a later. Just quiet. The way a room goes quiet when the last person leaves and the door clicks shut and there’s nothing left inside it worth staying for.

The wolfbane finished the rest.

I stopped fighting it. Closed my eyes. Let the cold take whatever was left.

The last thing I felt was the stone floor beneath my cheek.

The last thing I heard was Vanessa saying his name again, soft and relieved, like something that had been threatening her had just been removed.

And then 

Nothing.

And then I woke up.

The ceiling was wrong.

Not wrong exactly familiar, actually, too familiar  but my brain couldn’t make sense of it for a long dizzy second because the last thing I’d seen was dark sky above the valley and now there was a water stain above my left corner and pale morning light coming through a curtain I recognized and

I sat up too fast. The room tilted. I grabbed the edge of the mattress and just breathed, heart slamming, and looked around at the four walls closing me in.

My room. My old room. The one I’d had at eighteen.

My hand flew to my ribs.

Nothing.

I pressed harder, fingers searching for the wound, for the scar, for anything

Nothing.

The curtain shifted in a draft from the window and I stared at it and my brain started doing something I wasn’t ready for started pulling memories up one by one, not gently, just dumping them like it needed me to see every single one before I could pretend otherwise.

Six years. The dagger. His hands on my face.

She knew what she was to me.

A knock at the door made me go completely still.

“Sandra?” The voice on the other side was one I recognized. One I hadn’t heard in a very long time.

One I’d watched stop breathing.