Rebirth and Revenge:Lycan King’s Feisty Luna

Mallory/Eileen’s pov

I found them in the ruin behind the training grounds, Lucien’s hand fisted in Alice’s hair, her mouth open against his throat.

“Lucien.” My voice came out flat, stripped of everything except the sound of my own pulse. “Move away from her. Now.”

He didn’t move fast enough. Alice turned first, and she smiled at me over his shoulder, slow and satisfied, like she’d been waiting years for this exact moment to happen in front of me.

“You’re early,” she said.

“I’m your sister. I don’t need an appointment to find you.”

Lucien finally stepped back, dragging a hand down his face. “Mallory, this isn’t what you think.”

“Don’t.” The word came out jagged. Something tore behind my ribs, sharp and immediate, the mate bond ripping loose the way skin tears from bone. Three years of promises, and I felt every single one of them shredding at once. “Three years, Lucien. Three years, and you couldn’t even wait until I was out of the room.”

“You weren’t supposed to be out here tonight,” he said, and the excuse landed worse than silence would have.

“So this only counts as betrayal if I catch you at it.”

Alice stepped between us, blocking him from my view deliberately, angling her body so my only path back toward the treeline ran straight past her. “You should leave, Mallory. Before you say something you can’t take back.”

“I’m going to the Alpha Council.” I moved to step around her. “Both of you can explain yourselves to Father.”

She moved with me, matching me step for step, and I realized too late that she wasn’t simply blocking my path back to the trees. She was walking me somewhere specific, her shoulder nudging mine just enough to redirect me each time I tried to cut left.

“No one will believe you,” Alice said, her voice losing every trace of warmth. “You know that, don’t you. The golden mate, caught with his hand in someone else’s hair? They’ll say you imagined it. They’ll say grief made you cruel. I’ve spent a year making sure of it.”

“You planned this.”

“I’ve been planning this since we were children.” Her smile didn’t waver. “Lucien was never supposed to be yours.”

I felt the ledge behind my heel before I saw it, the storm-slick rock dropping away into nothing, and understood in the same instant that she’d herded me there on purpose, every step of this conversation aimed at exactly this spot.

“Move,” I said.

“No.”

I looked past her at Lucien, waiting for him to grab her arm, to tell her to stop, to do anything at all that would let me keep believing the last three years had meant something. He only stood there, silent, his eyes fixed on the ground between us like the truth was too heavy to lift his head under.

“Say it isn’t true,” I said. Once. That was all I had left in me to ask.

He didn’t.

“Lucien.” My voice cracked straight down the middle. “One word.”

Nothing.

Alice’s hands hit my chest before I registered she’d moved, and my heel slipped off rock into open air, rain lashing my face as I fell backward off the ledge.

“Lucien!” I screamed his name like it still meant something.

He didn’t move. He stood frozen at the edge, and the last thing I saw before the river closed over my head was his hand reaching out, not for me, but for Alice, pulling her back from the drop like she was the one in danger.

I hit the water hard enough to shatter something, and the current dragged me under before I could scream a second time.

Stone scraped my back. My knees found gravel. Somewhere between the river and this room I had crawled, or been carried, or both, because I was no longer falling, I was kneeling on a cold stone floor with my hands braced against a rug that smelled of lavender and beeswax, and none of it made sense against the roar still ringing in my ears.

I clawed my way upright in pieces. First the cold, bone-deep and total. Then the wrongness, a weight in my limbs that didn’t belong to me, hands too long, hair plastered against a jaw carved differently than my own.

I found a mirror hanging crooked on the wall behind a washbasin, and the woman staring back screamed before I understood the sound was coming from my own throat.

Dark hair instead of copper. A sharper chin. Eyes the wrong shade of brown, set into a face I had never once seen in my life. I pressed both palms flat against the glass, watching this stranger’s mouth move when I spoke, and beneath the terror, foreign memories crashed into my skull like a second person forcing their way inside, a name, a father, a wedding gown waiting three rooms away.

Eileen Hayden.

“This isn’t me.” My voice shook, but it wasn’t my voice anymore either. “This isn’t my face.”

The door slammed open behind me.

“There you are.” A maid swept in, breathless, carrying a dress draped over both arms, gold thread catching the candlelight in vicious little glints. “Miss Hayden, the wedding starts in three hours, and you’re standing here talking to yourself.”

“Wedding,” I whispered.

“Yes, wedding.” She dropped the gown onto the bed like it might bite her, black silk pooling across the white sheets, gold embroidery snaking across the bodice in patterns that looked less like decoration and more like a cage built to fit a woman’s ribs. “Yours. To the Supreme Alpha.”

The name hadn’t even left her mouth yet, and already my pulse was climbing, some current running under my own thoughts that didn’t belong to me, a dread that felt inherited rather than earned.

“Say his name,” I said.

The maid’s hands stilled on the fabric. “You truly hit your head hard, didn’t you.”

“Say it.”

She glanced at the door, then back at me, and lowered her voice to something barely above breath.

“Alaric.”

The word hit me like a physical blow, my whole body flinching before my mind caught up to why, some buried instinct in this stolen skin recoiling from four syllables the way a hand recoils from flame. Whatever fear this body carried toward that name, it had been carved deep, long before I ever arrived to wear it.

“Tell me about him,” I said, forcing my voice steady over the tremor threatening to crack it. “Everything. Now.”

“There’s no time to tell you everything, Miss Hayden. There’s barely time to dress you.” Her fingers trembled as she reached for the laces at the back of the gown. “But I’ll tell you one thing, since you seem to have forgotten every other thing today.”

“What.”

“Don’t look him in the eye tonight.” Her hands stilled completely against the black silk, and when she finally met my gaze, real fear sat behind her own. “The last bride who did never made it past the ceremony. They found her veil. They never found the rest of her.”