Nineteen Again

I woke up nineteen years old again and already dying inside.

For a second I didn't understand why the ceiling looked wrong. Then I realized it wasn't wrong. It was the ceiling of my old room, the one with the water stain shaped like a crescent moon that my mother used to say was the moon Goddess watching over me. I hadn't seen that stain in five years. I hadn't seen this room in five years.

I sat up too fast and my head spun. My hands came up on instinct, pressing flat against my stomach, searching for the raised line of scar tissue Lira's blade had left me. It wasn't there. My skin was smooth and unmarked, the skin of a girl who had never been stabbed by her own sister, never bled out on cold marble while the man she loved held her and lied to her with his eyes.

"You're up early," Petra said, breezing through the door with an armful of blue silk. "I thought I'd have to drag you out of bed myself. Do you know what today is?."

I knew what today was. I had died remembering what today was.

"The proposal," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. I filed that away. Whatever I was, I could still perform.

"The proposal." Petra beamed like I had said something clever instead of something obvious. She was twenty-two and had been my handmaid since we were children, and in my first life I had loved her without really looking at her. Now I look at her and felt something crack open in my chest, because I remember standing at her funeral pyre four years from now, in the life I no longer had. She didn't know that. She would never need to know that unless I let it happen again.

"The Nightfang envoy is already at the gate," she said, laying the silk across my bed like it was something holy. "Can you imagine? Kai Thorn's own father sending word this early. Your own father said it means they want it badly. A Voss and a Nightfang match would make you the wife of the strongest alpha In Lunara someday."

I know, I wanted to say. I was his wife. I planned his council calendar and warmed his bed and believed every word he told me, and none of it was real. It was a merger with a bow on it.

"That's wonderful," I said instead.

Petra's smile faltered for half a second. " You don't sound wonderful."

"I'm nervous," I said, which was true in a way she could not understand. "It's a lot to take in before breakfast."

"You'll be radiant." She held that blue silk up against my shoulders and turned me towards the mirror, and I let her, because a part of me still remembered how to be nineteen and obedient even if the rest of me was twenty-four years of grief wearing a teenager's face.

The girl in the mirror had my eyes. That was the strangest part. Not the smooth skin or the narrow waist or the way my hair fell longer than I'd worn it in years, but the eyes. They were mine, and they still had hope in them, an entire ocean of hope I didn't recognize anymore, hope for a marriage I already knew would end with a knife between my ribs.

I wanted to reach into the glass and shake her. I wanted to tell her to run.

"Selene." Petra's hand was on my shoulder. "Where did you go just now?."

"Nowhere," I said. "I'm here."

I wasn't sure that was true either. Some part of me was still on that marble floor, still hearing Lira's voice telling me I had only been a tool, still watching the grey of Kai's eyes fill with something that looked like grief and might have been guilt instead. I hadn't known in five years of marriage and I wasn't going to figure it out by drowning in the memory of my own death before breakfast.

"You've been odd since you woke up," Petra said, softer now, the way she used to talk to me when I was small and had nightmares. "Are you scared? Of the marriage?."

I almost laughed. Scared didn't cover it. Scared was a small human word for what I felt, standing in a body that hadn't earned any of the things I remembered, staring down at a proposal I had once said yes to with my whole stupid trusting heart.

"I don't know what I am," I said, and for once it was the truest thing I'd said all morning.

Petra frowned at me in the mirror. "You are Selene Voss. You are about to be the most envied woman in Lunara. That's what you are."

"Is that what you'd want?" I asked. "To be envied?"

"I'd want to be loved," she said, simply, like it was obvious, like it wasn't the exact thing I once believed I had and lost. "But I'd rather be envious. It's not a bad consolation."

I almost told her the truth. I almost said, I was loved, or I thought I was, and it still ended with a blade and a lie, so forgive me if I don't trust the difference between the two anymore. I didn't say any of it. She wouldn't have understood, and worse, she would have worried, and I had already decided in the space of one morning that worry was a luxury I couldn't afford anyone else right now.

"Sit," she said, steering me toward the stool by the window. "Your father wants you presentable before he even sees you, and I'm not explaining to him why his daughter looks like she saw a ghost on her betrothal morning."

If only she knew how close that was to true.

She worked quickly, braiding sections of my hair back from my face while I stared at my own reflection and tried to remember how a nineteen-year-old who hadn't died yet was supposed to sit. Straighter, I decided. Looser In the shoulders. I hadn't realized how much of my posture in my first marriage had been armor until I had consciously taken it off.

"There," Petra said, stepping back to admire her work. "Now you look like a girl about to be proposed to, not a girl about to attend a funeral."

"Wrong occasion," I said, and my voice came out lighter than I felt, which I counted as a small victory.

"Your father is waiting downstairs," she added, checking the angle of light through the window like she could read the hour off it. "He wanted to speak with you before the envoy's formal arrival. Something about making sure you understood the honor of it."

I already understood the honor of it. I had lived five years married to that honor. I had died wearing it like a crown that turned out to be borrowed.

Downstairs, my father was pacing the length of the receiving hall with the particular energy of a man rehearsing a speech he'd already decided not to need. He stopped when he saw me, and for a moment something soft crossed his face, something that almost looked like the way he used to look at me before I understood what he was capable of not telling me.

"You look well," he said. "Nervous, but well."

"I'm fine," I replied.

"This is a good match, Selene. The best this pack has ever secured." He took my hand in his, and his grip was warm, familiar, the same grip I had remembered from a hundred mornings that no longer existed. "I know it feels sudden. But you'll want nothing more than being Kai Thorn's wife. Nothing at all."

I wanted to laugh, or cry, or both at once. I had wanted nothing more, materially. That had never been the problem. The problem had been waking up every morning of my marriage wondering if the man beside me had ever once looked at me and seen a person instead of a merger.

"I know," I said, because it was easier than what I actually knew.

That was when the door burst open and the guard came through it, breathless, and the whole shape of the morning I remembered started coming apart in my hands.

Petra didn't understand it, of course. She just took it as bridal nerves and pulled me toward the washbasin, chattering about how the nightfang envoy had ridden through the night to be here, how proud my father would be, how the whole pack was already whispering about the match. I let the words wash over me while I scrubbed the sleep from my face and tried to remember how to breathe like someone who hadn't lived and died once.

I kept waiting for the grief to knock me flat. But it didn't. It sat in my chest, heavy and constant, but I could still stand. I could still move. Somewhere underneath the grief was something colder and sharper, something that had been forged In the moment Lira's blade went in, and it was telling very clearly that whatever this was, whatever the goddess had done to me, I was not going to waste it being afraid.

I was still telling myself that when someone knocked hard on the door, three sharp raps that didn't belong to anyone in my father's household.

Petra opened it to find one of the border guards, out of breath.

"Forgive the intrusion," he said, bowing so fast he nearly overbalanced. "Alpha Voss sent me. The Nightfang envoy has arrived."

"We know," Petra said. "The proposal isn't until this afternoon."

"That's the thing." The guard swallowed. "They're not scheduled until tomorrow, my lady. That's what the letter said. Tomorrow. But they're at the gate right now, a full day early, and Alpha Voss wants his daughter presentable within the hour."

The washbasin water went cold under my hands.

I remembered this morning. I had lived it once already. The envoy had arrived at midday, not at dawn. It had arrived exactly when the letter said it would.

Which meant one of two things. Either the memory of the life I'd already lived wasn't as reliable as I'd built my entire plan around.

Or something had already changed, and I didn't do it.