Chapter 4: Fox, Wolf, Whatever!

Phoebe's POV

I walked back to the dining table, Flora's eyes tracking me the entire way, searching my face for something she couldn't quite name. I let her look. Let her wonder. She wasn't the only one who'd notice something had shifted in me — she just wouldn't understand what, or why, until it was far too late to matter.

"Dad, let's train more soldiers," I said, ignoring Flora's stare and turning my full attention to my father instead. "We never know what could happen."

He raised an eyebrow, mild surprise crossing his face. "That's... a sudden request, Phoebe."

"Better prepared than sorry." I kept my voice light, casual, like the words weren't the first quiet move in a war he didn't know had already started. There was no version of this life where I let Simon do to me what he'd done before. Not again. Not while I still had breath to plan with.

"But Phoebe—" Flora started, brow furrowed, and I could already hear the question forming behind her teeth.

Why now? What aren't you telling us?

"Just trust me on this one," I said, softer than before, and something in my tone must have carried enough weight that she let it go, though her eyes lingered on me a moment longer, unconvinced.

"I'm so sorry, but—" Shantel appeared in the doorway, wringing her hands, and I already knew exactly what was coming before she finished the sentence. I'd heard this exact apology once before, in another life, delivered with the same nervous flutter in her voice.

"Alpha Simon won't be able to make it."

The old me would have screamed, convinced the world was ending because her crush hadn't shown up on time. I only smiled, slow and deliberate, and nodded like the news meant nothing at all.

Shantel blinked, clearly braced for tears that never came. I almost laughed at her confusion. Almost.

***

I found Simon in the hallway of the packhouse an hour later, exactly where memory told me he'd be — leaning against the window, waiting for me with that same effortless, practiced charm radiating off him like heat.

He looked glamorous as ever. Infuriatingly so. "I'm sorry, Phoebe."

The way my name curled off his tongue was too smooth, too rehearsed, too good to be anything but a performance he'd given a hundred times before to a hundred different people who never once suspected the mask. I let out a soft, easy laugh and accepted his open arms anyway, my body folding into the hug like it hadn't already learned, in blood and broken glass, exactly what those arms were capable of.

Up close, he smelled the same as he always had — pine and something warmer underneath, a scent I used to think of as home. Now it just made my stomach twist.

"I couldn't make it. Something important came up in my pack." His smile widened, dimples cutting into his cheeks — the same dimples that used to send my heart into a stupid, helpless spiral. "Walk with me?"

I gave him a cool, unreadable look and nodded slowly, cataloguing every flicker of expression I'd been too infatuated to notice the first time around. The slight tightness at the corner of his mouth. The way his eyes moved a half-second too fast when he lied. He seemed so genuine. That was the terrifying part — he'd always seemed genuine, right up until the moment he left and Stella buried her claws into me and was smiling over my dying body.

My heart still betrayed me anyway, that same old ache flickering somewhere beneath my ribs despite everything I knew now. Five years of marriage, built on a foundation of lies, engineered from the very beginning to end with him claiming both packs and discarding me for his true mate the second I'd outlived my usefulness. My death hadn't been an accident. It had been the plan all along, and I'd walked into it smiling, amulet in my hand, believing myself loved.

Not this time.

We walked in silence for a stretch, his footsteps unhurried beside mine, and I could feel him watching me from the corner of his eye — testing, maybe, whether I'd fallen back into old rhythms yet. I gave him nothing. Just enough warmth to keep him guessing, just enough distance to keep him hungry.

"So," Simon said, slowing his steps, that familiar warmth sliding into his voice like he'd rehearsed the line in front of a mirror. "Will you be my date for the Crescent Festival tomorrow? At my packhouse."

In my first life, I'd said yes before he'd even finished the sentence, giddy and breathless, clutching that invitation like it was the only thing keeping me tethered to happiness. I remembered exactly how it felt — like winning something. Like being chosen.

This time, the words landed differently. Colder. Calculating.

Because now I understood what the Crescent Festival really was — not romance, not tradition, but a stage. A stage where he'd ask me to be his bonded mate. Every smile he'd ever given me had been a down payment on a war he intended to win without lifting a single claw.

I could refuse. I could walk away from this hallway and never let him touch me again.

Or I could do something far more dangerous. I could play his game so perfectly that he never saw the blade until it was already between his ribs.

Why be the pawn again, when I could be the knight instead? Patient. Deceptive. Unpredictable in exactly the ways he'd never bothered to imagine, because the girl he remembered had never once fought back.

"Yes," I said, and let my voice catch, just slightly, just enough — the exact breathless delight he'd expect from the woman he thought he already owned completely.

His smile widened, satisfied, certain he'd read me perfectly. He reached for my hand, lacing his fingers through mine like he'd already claimed something that hadn't ever truly been his in the first place. I let him. I even smiled back.

He thought this was easy. He thought I was still the same fool who'd hugged him the moment he walked through a door, amulet clutched to her chest, blind to every warning sign flashing right in front of her.

He had no idea what he'd actually invited back into his life.

He thinks he knows the fox in front of him.

He has absolutely no idea what she's capable of.