Chapter One: Death And Rebirth

Mallory/Eileen’s pov

“Lucian, are you in there?”

I called his name twice before pushing through the slick, rain-soaked branches my first mistake. The second was hoping he would answer.

He didn’t.

I found him with his hand tangled in Alice’s hair, her mouth pressed to his throat. They were both drenched from the storm, both too absorbed in each other to notice I’d arrived. For a heartbeat, I convinced myself it was a trick of the darkness.

Then Alice opened her eyes.

She looked straight at me over his shoulder and smiled.

She freaking grinned victoriously.

“Alice!” My voice didn’t sound like my own. “Get away from him.”

Lucian shoved her back so abruptly she stumbled against a boulder. “Mallory… this isn’t—”

“Don’t.” Something split open in my chest, clean down the middle. “Don’t you dare tell me this isn’t what it looks like. I can smell her on you.”

Alice smoothed her dress as if time itself belonged to her. “You shouldn’t eavesdrop, walk into the woods, sister. It’s dangerous.”

“You’re my sister.” The word fractured on my tongue, and I hated myself for it. “He’s my mate.”

“He was never really yours.” She tilted her head, almost soft, almost kind if I hadn’t known her. “He just hadn’t realized it yet.”

I turned to Lucian, waiting. Waiting for him to deny it, to grab her, to say anything that would let me keep the last three years of my life intact.

But he looked down at his boots instead.

“Say something,” I whispered. “Lucian. Say something.”

“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

A laugh tore out of me half sound, half sob. “You didn’t mean for your fangs to end up on her neck? Did they just fall there?”

“Watch your mouth,” Alice snapped.

“Or what, Alice?” Something old and buried surged up my throat, sharp and burning. “You’ve hated me since we were girls. Smiled in my face while taking everything that was mine. And now you want him too.”

“I don’t want anything that’s yours.” For a flicker, her composure cracked, and I saw the truth underneath it, raw, starved. “I want what should have been mine. Father always chose you. The pack always chose you. I’m done losing.”

“So you stole him!?” I shouted.

“I didn’t have to steal him.” She stepped closer, rain sliding off her like it refused to touch her. “He came to me on his own. Ask him.”

I looked at Lucian one last time. “Tell her she’s lying.”

“Lucian.” My voice broke. “Please. Just say one word.”

He rubbed the back of his neck, still refusing to meet my eyes. At that moment, I understood with brutal clarity that his decision had been made long before tonight. The rain filled the silence between us, and that silence said everything three years of promises had failed to protect.

“I’m going to the Alpha Council,” I said, stepping backward toward the cliff edge. Not because I was afraid of them—but because I couldn’t breathe where I stood anymore. “Your father will hear every word of this. Everyone will know exactly what you’ve done.”

Alice’s expression shifted.

“No,” she said softly. “You won’t.”

“Watch me.”

She moved faster than I thought possible. One moment she was standing there smiling faintly, almost pitying and the next her hands slammed into my chest.

I stumbled.

The ground vanished.

Rain rushed into my vision as I fell backward off the cliff, the sky spinning violently above me. The last clear image burned into my mind was Alice’s face, shrinking as I dropped away from her.

“Alice!” Her name tore out of me like it still had the power to save something.

For a fraction of a heartbeat, I believed Lucian would jump to save me. That the bond, whatever it meant, whatever it had once been, would force him to move. That he would reach for me the way mates were supposed to.

Instead, he caught her.

He pulled Alice back from the edge like she was the one worth saving.

My scream shattered against the storm and disappeared.

The last thing I saw before everything blurred was his arms around her shoulders holding her close, steadying her as I fell.

Impact never truly came. Only cold. Only the taste of blood at my lips and the distant, distorted sound of Alice’s voice above me, already collapsing into practiced grief.

“She jumped,” she was saying, breathless. “Oh goddess… she just—she jumped—”

I tried to speak. To correct her that she pushed me. To scream the truth into the storm. Nothing came out but a broken exhale.

Lucian’s face appeared at the edge, pale against the rain, staring down at me.

He didn’t come down.

He didn’t call for help.

He turned away.

I watched him wrap Alice into his chest and guide her back into the trees. And just before the world went dark, her voice followed me trembling, and already satisfied beneath the act.

“It’s over for you, Mallory.” she whispered. “She’s finally gone.”

Darkness pressed in.

My body grew colder by the second. Somewhere beneath it all, one thought burned brighter than pain.

If I get another breath… I will burn both of them to the ground.

My heartbeat stuttered then stopped.

And then—

A bright light slammed back into me like a strike of lightning.

I gasped awake.

Hands were on my shoulders, shaking me. A voice I didn’t recognize cut through the fog.

“Miss Eileen! Miss Hayden, wake up—your wedding starts in three hours and you are still not dressed!”

My eyes snapped open to a room I had never seen, a face I did not know.

And the first word I said was the only one that mattered.

“Wedding?”

The realisation hit me after a long while that I had died and woken in a new body.

I wasn’t Mallory Hawthorne anymore.

But Eileen Hayden.