Chapter 3 — Familiar Stranger

Sandra’s POV

Nobody told me he’d be at breakfast.

That sounds ridiculous. He was the Alpha. He went where he wanted, showed up when he felt like it, and nobody scheduled around him everyone else just adjusted. I knew that. I’d spent six years adjusting.

But I’d had maybe forty minutes of being back in this body and I wasn’t ready. That was the honest truth. I’d stood at that window and made my decisions and felt solid about them and then he walked through that door and something in my chest did this slow, horrible recognition thing that I had absolutely no control over.

Six years of loving someone leaves marks. Apparently dying doesn’t remove them.

I looked down at my plate.

“Zadok.” My father’s voice, pulling into something respectful and eager the way it always did around pack authority. “We weren’t expecting you this morning.”

“I wanted to check on the household.” Zadok’s voice. Same as I remembered — low, even, the kind of voice that didn’t need volume to fill a room. “After last night.”

Last night. The Blood Ceremony. Except in this timeline last night’s ceremony hadn’t happened yet — I was eighteen, which meant the attack was six years away, which meant whatever ceremony he was referring to was a different one entirely.

I had to be more careful. I kept mixing timelines in my head and that was going to get me into trouble.

I reached for my cup and took a slow sip and kept my eyes down and tried to remember what eighteen year old Sandra would be doing right now. Probably trying very hard not to look at him. Sneaking small glances. Hoping he’d notice her without knowing what she’d do if he actually did.

So. Not that different from what I was currently doing, which was annoying.

“Sandra.”

My name in his mouth and my eyes went up before I could stop them. He was looking directly at me from across the room and his expression was the standard one — polite, attentive, the one he used on everyone — but something about being looked at by him directly still did something I resented.

“You’re well?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

He held the look for a half second longer than necessary and then moved on to whatever he’d actually come to discuss with my father and I went back to my plate and focused very hard on breathing normally.

Vanessa was watching me.

I felt it before I confirmed it — that particular quality of attention she had, sharp underneath the soft surface. I looked up and met her eyes and she smiled. That specific smile she had that looked like warmth from a distance and felt like assessment up close.

“You look tired,” she said. “Bad night?”

“I slept fine,” I said.

“You look pale.”

“I’m always pale, Vanessa.”

Something moved in her eyes. Quick and unreadable. She picked up her cup and looked away and the conversation moved on and nobody else at the table noticed anything but I noticed. I filed it away the way I was going to be filing everything from now on.

Vanessa noticed things about me. That wasn’t new — she’d always watched me with that particular careful attention that I used to mistake for sisterly concern. I understood it better now. She watched me the way you watch something that might become a problem. She’d been doing it for years and I’d been too busy watching Zadok to pay proper attention.

That was changing.

Breakfast moved slowly. My father talked about pack business, something about territory boundaries and a meeting coming up, and Zadok stood near the window and listened and occasionally said something that redirected the whole conversation without seeming to try. I watched him from my periphery and hated how familiar every small thing was — the way he stood, the way he held his cup, the slight pause before he spoke like he was making sure the words were worth saying.

I knew him so well it was a problem.

The thing about loving someone for six years, even quietly, even without them knowing, was that you learned them. All the small things nobody else bothered to notice because they weren’t paying the same quality of attention. I knew his habits and his tells and the specific way his jaw shifted when someone said something he disagreed with but wasn’t going to address directly.

That knowledge was supposed to be my advantage now.

It didn’t feel like an advantage. It felt like standing too close to something warm when you’d already decided you were done being cold.

I pushed back from the table. “Excuse me.”

My father glanced up. Vanessa’s eyes tracked me. Zadok didn’t turn around.

I walked out through the side door that let onto the east garden and stood in the cool morning air and pressed my hands together and talked to myself very firmly for approximately thirty seconds.

I had six years of information. I knew what was coming. I knew what Zadok was and what he wasn’t and I knew exactly how this ended the first time and I was not — I was absolutely not — going to spend this second life falling into the same patterns because my chest did something inconvenient every time he said my name.

I was better than that now.

I had to be.

The garden was quiet. Dew still on the grass, the sun not quite high enough yet to burn it off. I walked to the stone bench at the far end and sat and looked at the tree line and let the cold air do its work.

I heard the door behind me.

Footsteps on the path — unhurried, deliberate. I knew the sound of them. Of course I did.

I didn’t turn around.

Zadok came and stood at the edge of the bench and was quiet for a moment in that way he had, like silence didn’t cost him anything.

“You left quickly,” he said.

“I needed air.”

Another pause. I kept my eyes on the tree line.

“Sandra.” Something in his tone was different. Careful. Like he was approaching something he hadn’t quite figured out yet. “Is there something you want to say to me?”

And there it was. Six years early and he was already asking me that question — the one he’d never asked in the first life, not once, not even when the answer was written all over my face every time I looked at him.

I turned and looked at him slowly.

“No,” I said. “Should there be?”

His eyes stayed on mine a beat too long.

And then his expression shifted into something I didn’t recognize. Something I had never seen on his face in six years of watching him closer than anyone knew.

I didn’t have a file for it.

That scared me more than anything else had since I woke up.