Not This Time

The door swung open, and my husband walked in.

Zion stopped just inside the threshold, one hand still on the handle, as if he hadn’t decided whether to stay. He’d shed his suit jacket somewhere. His black dress shirt was open at the collar, sleeves rolled to his forearms, and the firelight caught the hard lines of his face.

Tall. Broad-shouldered. Storm-gray eyes that never warmed for me.

Not once, in a whole lifetime.

His scent reached me a second later: cedar and cold rain. My stomach rolled.

Rain. Mud. His breath against my temple.

Maybe this contract was a mistake.

I curled my fingers into the silk of my gown until my knuckles ached.

Then, like a door creaking open in my head, another memory surfaced.

This room. These candles. Me, rising from this bed with my heart pounding, crossing the floor to him in my wedding gown. Reaching for the buttons of his shirt with trembling hands. Whispering that I was his, all of me.

And Zion catching my wrists. Holding them away from him like I was something dirty.

Don’t.

One word. Then he’d let go and stepped back, and the look in his eyes...

I’d cried myself to sleep on the floor beside the hearth that night. He hadn’t come back until morning.

The memory faded as fast as it came, leaving my face hot with a shame that belonged to another girl.

Not to me. Not anymore.

Zion closed the door behind him. “We need to talk.”

I didn’t stand. I didn’t rush to him. I sat exactly where I was, back straight, hands folded in my lap, and looked at him.

Something flickered across his face. Surprise, maybe. He’d probably expected me to be blushing and fluttering, waiting with open arms. The girl he married this morning would have been.

He crossed the room slowly, and the air grew heavier with every step. Alpha aura. It pressed down on my shoulders, my chest, the back of my neck, telling every instinct I had to lower my eyes.

In my last life, I always had.

This time, I lifted my chin.

His brows drew together. He stopped a few feet away and looked down at me from his full height.

“I’ll be honest with you, Kira,” he said. “This marriage isn’t…”

“You married me because you can’t have Jessi.”

Silence.

The fire popped. Somewhere outside, a wolf howled at the moon.

Zion went perfectly still. Not angry. Not cold. Just stunned, as if I’d reached across the space between us and slapped him.

“What did you say?” His voice was low. Dangerous.

My heart was hammering in my throat, but my voice came out steady. “You heard me. The Moon Goddess gave her to Dakota. You lost her, and marrying Dark Moon’s unwanted stepdaughter was the easiest way to keep visiting.”

His jaw flexed. “Who told you that?”

You did, I thought. For a whole year. In every look you gave her across a crowded room. In every night you spent at Dark Moon while I waited at home.

“No one had to,” I said. “I’m not blind.”

He stared at me as if seeing me for the first time, his gaze searching my face. Looking for the trembling, lovesick girl who stood beside him at the altar that morning, maybe.

He wasn’t going to find her.

She died in the mud.

Zion raked a hand through his hair, and that was when I saw it.

Tied around his left wrist, half-hidden under his rolled sleeve, was a ribbon. Faded blue, frayed at the edges, so worn it was almost gray. It looked completely out of place on a man in a tailored shirt and a watch that probably cost more than my mother’s hospital bills.

In my last life, he’d never taken it off.

I never asked about it. I was too afraid of him to ask him anything.

Now, staring at that little scrap of fabric, something tugged deep in my chest. A soft, strange ache, like hearing a song I used to know but couldn’t remember the words to.

I frowned and looked away.

It didn’t matter. Nothing about him mattered except what he could do for me and Mom.

“Fine,” Zion said at last. His voice had cooled again, every trace of surprise locked away. “Since you already understand the situation, we can skip the part where I break it to you gently.”

He pulled a folded document from his back pocket and dropped it on the bed beside me.

Bold black letters ran across the top.

MARRIAGE AGREEMENT.

My fingers went cold.

I knew this paper. I’d signed it once already, through a blur of tears, without reading a single line.

Zion crossed his arms, his gray eyes hard as stone.