Reborn

POV: Maya

Suddenly, the sky became dark around the edges first. Then everything went black, snd6 my heart that is already failing, finally stopped. 

And then...

"Mummy?"

A small, warm hand shook mine.

My eyes flew open with a breath so sharp it scraped my throat raw.

"Mummy? 

What are you thinking about? 

You've gone all funny again." He chuckled softly. I was standing upright. Standing and not bleeding out in a ditch.

My fingers were tightly wrapped around a small hand that was warm, moving and very much alive.

Caleb stood beside me, blinking up at me with mild concern, like a boy who had already asked his mother a question twice and still hadn't received an answer.

Behind him stretched the wide, sunlit forecourt of the Blackstorm border checkpoint, wolves dressed in human clothes moving quickly between parked cars. The scent of pine and pack land filled the afternoon air.

I dropped to my knees right there on the gravel and pulled him into my arms so tightly that he made a small, surprised sound.

"Mummy, you're squishing me."

"I missed you," I said, my voice breaking as tears suddenly rushed down my face. Caleb became still in my arms, unsure what to do with a mother who was crying and laughing at the same time. "I missed you so, so much."

He was alive...

He was warm...

He was breathing...

And he was completely unaware that his mother now knew something about him that would have to wait, for a while longer, before I found the words to tell him.

"We were literally just at home an hour ago," Caleb said, patting my back in the careful, awkward way children did when adults cried in front of them. 

"Did something happen?"

I pulled back just enough to look at him properly.

His cheeks were pink from the walk across the checkpoint. His dark eyes were clear and peaceful, and his wolf hummed quietly beneath his skin, healthy and strong like it was supposed to.

No wolfsbane...

No ditch...

No blood soaking into gravel. I had been sent back. Back to this exact day, this exact hour, standing at the border checkpoint with my son's hand in mine. Because this was the day Elise came home.

My mind raced through everything, fast and merciless, every word Elise had spoken while crouched over my dying body arranging itself into a picture I could finally see clearly.

The affair that had lasted years, hidden behind Luna duties and pack rules. The slow poison in my tea and Caleb's juice, given patiently and without hurry because Elise had never needed to rush when she had all the time a scheming wolf could want.

The wreck that had only finished what she had already started. And beneath all of it was the thing that had almost stopped my heart before the blood loss ever finished the job.

The hunting lodge...

The drunken night that had never involved Nathaniel at all. A stranger paid, instructed and sent to my bed by a woman who had been changing the course of my life from a distance for years before I even knew her name.

Caleb was not Nathaniel's son, he had never been. And somewhere out there, in this life just as much as the last, was a wolf who didn't yet know he had a child.

It's meant Elathan will be Alpha one day. My wolf, usually quiet and obedient beneath six years of Luna training, rose inside me with a snarl that had nothing obedient left in it.

"Mummy?"

Caleb's small, uncertain voice pulled me back.

"You're scaring me a bit."

"I know, love." I smoothed his hair with a hand that was finally steady.

"I'm not upset with you. I'm never going to be upset with you again. Do you understand?"

He didn't fully understand, but he nodded anyway, the way children often did when an adult's tone mattered more than the words. Across the checkpoint, a black SUV slowly came to a stop.

Nathaniel stepped out, already searching the crowd. He held a bouquet in one hand, and there was an expression on his face that I suddenly recognised with sickening clarity.

It was an expression I had once mistaken for warmth meant for me. Now I understood that it had never once, in six years, actually been meant for me.

He wasn't looking for us...

He was looking past us, toward the arrivals gate, where a car door was opening and a woman was stepping out in heels far too sharp for pack land. Her sunglasses were pushed into hair that had not changed since the moment she had bent over my dying body in the ditch.

A ditch that, in this life, would never happen.

Elise.

And beside her, small and eager, stood a boy I recognised with another cold jolt.

Elathan.

Nathaniel's face broke into a smile I had never once seen him give me. Not in six years of marriage, not on our mating night, not even once. He crossed the forecourt toward Elise without giving his own son so much as a glance.

My wolf became very still and focused, the way a predator becomes still just before it moves. I pulled my phone from my pocket. My thumb was steady as I called him. He answered on the third ring, distracted and already half turned toward Elise.

"Maya? What is it?"

"Caleb and I are at the checkpoint." There was a pause.

In the background, Elise's low, delighted laugh drifted through the phone. The exact same laugh I had heard as she walked away from the ditch not even twenty minutes ago. One entire lifetime ago.

"Something's come up," Nathaniel said. 

"I'll send someone for you."

"Don't bother," I replied. Every word came out calm, cold and certain.

"I'll manage." I ended the call before he could argue.

And this time, for the first time in six years, I didn't wait for anyone to tell me what to do next. I opened an Uber app instead.

Human technology...

Something no pack tracker would think to check. I requested a car right there on the forecourt, fully in view of the reunion happening thirty feet away.

Nathaniel noticed me a moment later. His head turned as though some instinct had finally caught up with what his eyes should have noticed from the beginning.

He walked toward me, confusion changing into something sharper when he saw my face.

"Looks like we're interrupting your reunion," I said before he could speak. My voice didn't shake.

Behind my ribs, my wolf didn't shake either. She snarled the words up through my chest before my human mouth had even finished deciding to say them.

"Let's get a divorce, Nathaniel." His face became rigid.

"Maya, what the hell do you think you're doing?"

"We're through," I said. This time it wasn't a question, it wasn't a threat.

It wasn't the beginning of another argument he could win by simply waiting me out, the way he had won every argument for six years.

“I Maya Blackstorm reject you as my mate and Alpha.” I said body, ignoring the ache inside my chest. 

“What are you saying, Maya, what has come over you, why are you being unnecessarily overdramatic?” he asks me.

“Expect the divorce letter in a few days,” I told him. It was the truth, A truth that had arrived six years and one death too late. And I said it exactly once before taking Caleb's hand and walking away. 

My wolf was quiet now...

Not because she had stopped mourning everything she had lost in another life. But because, for the first time in longer than I could remember, she finally, finally agreed with me.