Chapter 2 — The Girl Who Came Back

Sandra’s POV

I didn’t answer right away.

I just sat there on the edge of the mattress with my hand still pressed flat against my ribs and my heart doing something violent inside my chest. Three knocks. That pause. That voice.

Dara.

It couldn’t be Dara. Dara had gotten sick when I was twenty two — something that moved fast and didn’t respond to anything the pack healers tried. I’d sat with her through most of it. Held her hand at the end. Watched her go in a way that was somehow quieter and more devastating than my own death had been, which felt appropriate because that was always how it was with Dara. She made everything feel more real than it actually was.

She died two years before I did.

So the voice on the other side of that door was not Dara’s voice.

Except it was.

“Sandra.” Again. A little louder this time, with that specific texture she had when she was trying not to sound worried and failing. “I can hear you moving around. Are you sick?”

I stood up. Sat back down. Stood up again.

My legs worked fine. My ribs were fine. The wolfbane was gone like it had never happened and I was eighteen years old in a body that hadn’t earned a single one of the memories currently living inside it. I crossed the room and put my hand on the door and stood there for a second with my forehead almost touching the wood.

Then I opened it.

Dara looked exactly the way I remembered her from before the illness took over. Round face, grey streaks in her hair that she’d had since her forties, that permanent slight furrow between her brows that meant she was paying attention to you whether she looked like it or not. She was holding a small tray with bread and a cup of something warm and she looked at my face and the furrow deepened immediately.

“You look like you’ve seen something,” she said.

I had to press my lips together for a second. Just a second.

“Bad dream,” I said. My voice came out steady. I was surprised by that.

She looked at me the way she always had — like she was reading something written slightly beneath the surface of whatever I was showing her. Dara had always been able to do that. It was uncomfortable when I had things to hide, which was most of the time.

“Mm,” she said, which meant she didn’t fully believe me but wasn’t going to push yet. She held out the tray and I took it and she leaned against the doorframe with her arms crossed.

“The ceremony is being discussed at breakfast,” she said. “Your father wants everyone present.”

My father. The word landed somewhere strange. I’d stopped thinking of him as that a long time ago — stopped expecting anything from that direction, stopped letting it hurt when nothing came. At eighteen though, in this timeline, I hadn’t gotten there yet. The wound was still fresher. I’d have to be careful about that. About a lot of things.

“I’ll be down,” I said.

She stayed in the doorframe another moment. Still reading me.

“You sure it was just a dream?”

No. It was six years of my life and a wolfbane dagger and a man explaining me away while I bled out on stone. It was the most real thing that had ever happened to me and it happened in a life this version of me hasn’t lived yet.

“I’m sure,” I said.

She left.

I stood at the window with the bread in my hand and didn’t eat it. Just looked out at Blackridge — the tree line dark against the early sky, the Blackwood estate visible on the hill the way it always was, sitting up there like it owned everything below it, which it basically did.

Zadok was up there somewhere. Probably already awake, already moving through his morning the way Alphas did — certain, purposeful, completely unaware that the girl he’d written off in one sentence was standing at a window six years before that sentence and remembering every word of it.

I pressed my hand to the glass and let it be cold against my palm.

Here was the thing about coming back. I’d had, by my rough calculation, somewhere between waking up and Dara’s knock to decide who I was going to be. And I’d made that decision quietly, the way I made most decisions, without a lot of ceremony.

I wasn’t going to run. Wasn’t going to absent myself from the pack or disappear from Zadok’s orbit or do anything that would look like flinching. Flinching was for people who hadn’t already seen how the story ended.

I’d seen it. I’d lived it and died in it and I knew every beat of it coming — every moment Vanessa would use to remind me of my place, every small kindness Zadok would offer without meaning anything by it, every time I’d mistaken being noticed for being chosen.

I wasn’t going to make those mistakes again.

What I was going to do instead was stay exactly where I’d always been. Close, quiet, useful. Let them think they were getting the same Sandra. Let the whole pack think that. And while they were busy seeing what they expected to see, I was going to watch. Learn what I hadn’t known the first time. Find out what Vanessa and Zadok really were to each other because what I’d heard while I was dying had told me it was more complicated than I’d understood and I needed the full picture before I did anything with it.

I needed to know who’d ordered that dagger.

I needed to know why.

The sun came up over the tree line and Blackridge went from grey to gold and I stood there until I felt settled enough to move through the day without my face giving anything away.

Then I got dressed, fixed my hair, and went downstairs to have breakfast with a father who’d never claimed me and a half sister who’d watched me love a man for six years knowing he’d never love me back.

I smiled at both of them.

Vanessa looked up from across the table when I walked in. Something shifted in her expression — quick, almost imperceptible. Like she’d expected something from me and didn’t get it.

Good. Let her wonder.

Then the door at the far end of the dining room opened and Zadok walked in and looked straight at me and my heart did the one thing I’d specifically told it not to do.

It recognized him.