The Night I Died

The Lunar Citadel was full of light the night I died, and I remember thinking, right up until the knife, that I had never been happier.

Five years of marriage had taught me how to read a room full of Alphas, had taught me how to move around them, talk around them, and even breathe around them. Everything that had to do with them required a kind of carefulness and patience I had spent those five years learning.

Kai's hand rested on my back the whole evening, steady, warm, the way it always did at these galas, like he wanted every pack lord in Lunara to see exactly whose wife I was.

"You're doing the thing again," he murmured against my ear, midway through the conversation with the Ashwood delegation I'd barely been listening to.

"What thing?"

"Smiling like you have a secret." His grey eyes found mine, warm in a way that still, after five years, made my heart do something foolish. "Do you?"

"Maybe I'm just happy," I said.

"Good," he said, and pressed his mouth briefly to my temple, right there in front of the grand lunar council, which he never did, which should have told me something if I'd been paying attention to anything other than how much I loved him. "I like you happy."

I believed him. That's the part that still gets me, even now, even knowing everything I know. I believed every word out of his mouth that night, the way I'd believed every word for five years, because believing him had never once cost me anything before.

"Careful," I teased, glancing toward the Ashwood delegate, who was watching us with the particular fondness reserved for a marriage they thought had worked out exactly as it should be. "You'll ruin your reputation for being unreadable."

"My reputation survived worse than a wife who makes me happy in public." He took my hand and pressed a kiss to my knuckles, an old habit from our first year together that he'd never quite let go of. " Let them talk. I've earned the right to be soft about one thing in my life."

"One thing," I repeated, arching a brow.

"Don't get greedy, Selene." But he was smiling when he said it, the real smile, the one he almost never wore in a room full of people who wanted things from him, and I tucked the sight of it away the way I always did, a small private treasure I never once thought to question.

The music shifted. Somewhere near the doors, a ripple went through the crowd, the particular hush that meant someone important had arrived uninvited, and I turned in time to see Lira step through the entrance In a gown that had the exact color of a dried blood.

"Selene." She said my name sharply, like a blade sliding free from its sheath. "How lovely you look tonight."

"Lira." Kai's hand tightened at my back. "This is a closed gathering."

"Is it?" She smiled, and it didn't reach her eyes at all. "Funny. I thought family was always welcomed."

"You're not welcomed here," I said, and I meant it kindly, the way you mean things when you've spent five years telling yourself that your sister's bitterness is grief and nothing sharper.

"Kindly." Lira laughed, short and ugly. "You always did say the cruelest things kindly, Selene. It's a talent."

"I'm not trying to be cruel."

"No," she agreed. "You never are. That's what makes you so easy to hate."

"Lira." Kai stepped half in front of me, not quite a shield, but close enough I felt the shift of him. "Whatever this is, it ends now."

"Whatever this is." She looked at him like he'd said something almost funny. "You still can't say my name without flinching, can you? Five years, and you still look at me without remembering what you gave up to marry her."

"Family," she said again, tasting the word like it's something that disgusted her. "Do you know, Selene, I used to envy you so much I couldn't breathe. My own sister, stealing the one thing I always wanted."

"Lira, stop this."

"He never truly chose you." Her voice cracked through the music like a whip, loud enough that heads were turning, that the hush around us was spreading outward the rings. "You were only a tool for power. He cast me aside to marry you to become the strongest alpha alive. Ask him. Go on. Ask him if he ever loved you at all."

"That's enough." Kai's voice was loud, hard, and sounded dangerous. That was the voice he used for his enemies, and I could tell because I had watched him sound just like that, behind closed doors, talking to people that frustrated him. And for one terrible second I watched something flash behind his eyes that wasn't denial.

I never got to ask him what it was.

The blade went in before I understood she'd moved, a cold shock low my stomach that didn't hurt yet, that felt like one suspended second like nothing at all. Then it did hurt, all at once, everything at once, and the marble floor was rushing up to meet me and Kai's hands were the only thing that caught me before I hit it.

"Selene." His voice had broken open completely, raw in a way I'd never heard from him, not once in five years, not even the night his father's name came up and he'd had to leave the room. "Selene, look at me. Stay with me."

"He never truly chose you," Lira said again, standing closer to us, her head over us, watching as I bleed with satisfaction written all over her face. Then her voice changed, to something hollow and furious."You were only ever a tool for power. Ask him. Ask him now, while you still can."

"Don't listen to her." Kai's hands were pressed hard against the wound, shaking, blood soaking through his sleeves, through my gown, warmer than I expected, and then, too fast, too cold. "Selene. Stay awake. Someone get a healer, now, NOW!."

"Kai." My voice came out lower than I wanted it to. "Did you ever love me?"

He didn't answer right away. That silence lasted less than a second. I know that now, I've counted it a thousand times since, but at that moment it stretched out longer than our entire marriage, longer than every morning I'd woken up beside him believing I was cherished.

"Selene, please." His face was twisted with something I couldn't name, agony or guilt, or both at once, and I never found out which, because the hall was already going dark at the edges, the music and the screaming and Lira's ragged breathing all folding into something distant and underwater.

"Please don't leave me," he said, and I felt his tears land on face, hot against my skin that was already getting cold, and I thought, distantly, this was the first time in five years that I'd ever seen him cry.

The last thing I saw was his face, grey eyes, wrecked with something I would spend the rest of whatever came next trying to understand. The last thing I heard was my own name, said like a prayer, said like an apology, said like it might still mean something now.

Then the marble floor was gone. The music was gone. Kai's arms were gone. There was only black, endless and total, the kind of dark that doesn't have edges, and I understood, somewhere in the last unraveling thread of myself, that I was dying.

I didn't fight it. I was too tired to fight it. I let the dark take me the way you let yourself sink into water when your legs finally give out, and I thought, with the last clear thought I had, that at least it was over, that at least I wouldn't have to wonder anymore whether any of it had been real.

That was when the voice found me.

It came from everywhere, soft and cast and impossibly old, threading through the dark like moonlight through water.

"You have suffered unjustly, my daughter."

I tried to answer. I had no mouth left to answer with, no body, nothing but the last unraveling thread of whatever I still was, and the voice kept speaking anyway, patient, sorrowful, closer now than the dark itself.

"I grant you rebirth."

The words hit something in me that should have already been gone, some last stubborn spark that refused to finish dying, and for one impossible second I felt hope claw its way back to whatever was left of me, sharp enough to hurt.

"Awaken years before the wedding with all your memories intact," the voice said, and the darkness around me began to shift, to pull, like something enormous had reached into the water and closed it's hands around me. "Rewrite the fate that was stolen from you."

I wanted to ask how. I wanted to ask why me, what it would cost, whether I would even remember this moment when it was done. I never got the chance.

"But know this," the voice said, and for the first time it sounded almost afraid, "every change you make thins the veil between worlds. Greater shadows will stir, and the cost may be more than you can bear."

The darkness closed over me completely, and I stopped being able to hear anything at all.