Chapter 4: Reborn With Open Eyes

My heart slammed awake before my eyes did, hammering so hard I thought it might crack a rib.

I sat bolt upright, gasping, hands flying to my side where Selene's claws had torn through me, and found nothing there. No wound. No blood. Just cotton sheets, soft and unfamiliar in the dark, and my own skin, whole and warm and *alive*.

"What," I breathed. "What."

The room around me was wrong. Not wrong, exactly. Wrong the way a photograph of your childhood bedroom is wrong when you're too old to fit in it anymore, every detail correct and somehow still impossible. Pale curtains I recognized from years ago, moved out for something plainer when I turned nineteen. The little wooden wolf carving on my windowsill, the one Elias made me when we were kids, the one I'd packed away in a box after I married Kael because it felt too young, too soft, for the woman I was supposed to become.

It was sitting right there in the moonlight like it had never left.

I scrambled out of bed, legs shaking, and caught my reflection in the mirror above my dresser. My breath left me in a rush.

I looked young. Not dramatically so, but enough, the faint hollows under my eyes gone, the small white scar above my eyebrow from falling out of a tree at fourteen conspicuously absent, my hair longer than I'd worn it in years, the length I'd had before I cut it short for the wedding.

*Before the wedding.*

My hands found the edge of the dresser and gripped hard enough that my knuckles went white. The Moon Goddess. The clearing. Selene's claws, the copper smell, the silver light swallowing everything.

*Wake up, Luna Everly. Wake up and choose differently.*

"Oh my God," I said out loud, to the empty room, to the wolf carving, to nobody at all. "Oh my God, it's real."

I pressed both palms flat against my ribs where the wound should have been, pressing hard enough to hurt, needing the pain to prove I wasn't dreaming, that I hadn't finally cracked under the weight of everything. It hurt. Ordinary hurt, the kind from pressing too hard on healthy skin, not the searing agony of claws opening me up in a moonlit clearing.

I was alive. I was young. I was, somehow, impossibly, back.

My legs gave out and I sat down hard on the edge of my bed, breath coming in short, uneven pulls. I laughed, a broken, disbelieving sound that didn't feel like laughter at all. Then I pressed both hands over my mouth to muffle the sob that came right behind it.

*I'm alive. I'm alive. I'm alive.*

---

I didn't sleep again that night. Couldn't. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Selene's claws coming toward me, felt the phantom echo of pain that no longer belonged to my body, and I'd jerk awake all over again just to reassure myself the ceiling above me was the right one, the young one, the one from before everything went wrong.

Instead I paced. I touched things. My old jewelry box, still filled with the cheap glass beads I'd loved as a teenager instead of the fine jewelry Kael's family gave me later. A stack of books on my shelf I remembered giving away years ago. Proof after proof, small and strange, that I really had traveled backward through my own life.

When dawn finally crept grey through the curtains, I made myself sit at my window and think, actually think, instead of just reacting.

*Kael not yet Alpha of his own territory.* That detail surfaced slow, the way a fact does when your brain finally stops screaming long enough to work. In my first life, by this point, he'd already claimed the northern packlands from his uncle. If I was truly back this far, that transition hadn't happened yet. I could check.

*My mother.* My chest tightened at the thought, sharp enough to steal my breath. She died the spring after my wedding, quiet in her sleep, worn thin by illness that came on fast and cruel. If this was really years earlier, she should still be here. Alive. Downstairs, probably, already awake, already humming to herself in the kitchen the way she did every morning of my childhood.

I was out of my room and down the hall before I'd fully decided to move, bare feet silent on the old floorboards, heart in my throat.

I found her in the kitchen exactly like I remembered, exactly like I'd feared I'd never see again, humming under her breath while she stirred something on the stove, her dark hair pulled back loose, morning light catching the small silver hoops she always wore.

"Mom," I said, and my voice cracked wide open on the single syllable.

She turned, surprised, spoon still in hand. "Luna? What's wrong, sweetheart, you're white as a sheet."

I couldn't answer her. I crossed the kitchen and wrapped my arms around her instead, buried my face against her shoulder the way I hadn't since I was a child, and breathed in the smell of her, cedar soap and cinnamon, real and warm and *alive*, and I cried without any explanation I could possibly give her.

"Hey, hey," she murmured, one hand smoothing over my hair, confused but gentle, the way mothers are when their children fall apart without warning. "Whatever it is, we'll fix it. I promise. Nothing's so broken it can't be fixed."

*You have no idea*, I thought, holding onto her like she might vanish if I let go. *I already died once. I'm not losing you too. I'm not losing any of it again.*

---

I found Elias in the training yard an hour later, shirtless and sweating, running drills against a practice dummy with the same restless intensity he always carried, like his body needed to move faster than his mind could catch up to. He was younger too. No silver threading through his dark hair yet, none of the hard lines around his eyes that came later, after everything, after my death broke something in him that never fully healed.

He hadn't broken yet. Because none of it had happened yet.

He caught sight of me and grinned, easy and unguarded in a way I hadn't seen from him in years. "Morning, little sister. You're up early."

"Couldn't sleep," I said, which was, at least, entirely true.

I stood at the edge of the yard and watched him move, quick and sure, and something fierce and protective rose up in my chest that had nothing to do with nostalgia. In my first life, Elias found out about my death from a messenger at the door. He wasn't there. He couldn't stop it. He spent the rest of his life, however long that ended up being, wondering if he could have.

Not this time.

This time I knew things. I knew Kael's ledger existed before it was ever written. I knew Selene's grief before it curdled into violence. I knew, somewhere out in the dark beyond both of them, an older hand was pulling strings I hadn't even glimpsed yet, something the Moon Goddess herself refused to name outright.

I walked to my window that evening as the sun bled orange and gold across the training grounds, my mother's laughter drifting up faintly from somewhere in the house, my brother's easy voice calling something teasing to one of the pack guards, all of it so achingly, impossibly alive.

I pressed my palm flat against the cool glass and made myself a promise, the kind you make with your whole chest instead of just your mouth.

*I will not marry Kael Draven.*

*I will not trust blindly, not him, not anyone, not even people who smile at me with kind eyes.*

*And I will find out who really orchestrated my death, because some part of me, some cold certain instinct sitting low in my gut, already knows.*

*Kael and Selene were never the only ones responsible.*

Somewhere beyond the tree line, a wolf howled into the coming dark, and for the first time since I'd opened my eyes in that impossible, familiar bedroom, I didn't flinch at the sound.

I smiled instead. Slow, and sharp, and entirely my own.

*Let them come. This time, I'll be ready.*