Sembunyi, Duke! Suamiku Datang

Elena's POV

We'd been mates for five years, five years of sleeping in separate rooms.

In all that time I could count on one hand how often Damien came to me. These days he was too busy losing himself in Serena to spare me a thought.

I took the silver knife I'd hidden in the cabinet and, without a second's hesitation, opened my wrist.

The Moon Goddess had promised: once this body died, I'd return to my own world, to my family. I lay on the cold floor and watched the blood pour steadily out of me and pool on the tiles. I wasn't afraid. If anything, I felt lighter than I had in years.

As the blood drained out of me, my mind blurred, and the memories of this world began to play behind my eyes like a film.

When I'd first crossed over, the deal was simple: get any one of my three targets to a hundred percent affection, and I'd be paid enough to cover my mother's medical bills back home. So I gave it everything. I found a hundred ways to win them over, and their affection climbed, day by day. Home kept getting closer.

Then Serena came back, and twenty-five years of work turned to nothing overnight. Their love curdled into hate. They wanted me gone. They wanted to tear me apart.

I watched their affection crash to almost zero and understood I might never make it home.

But the Moon Goddess offered me one last way out. If this body died, I could still go home, back to the very moment I'd left.

So I waited for the end. And somewhere in the haze, a familiar voice was calling my name, frantic.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in a hospital bed, and someone I knew far too well was sitting beside me.

He saw me wake, and something like disgust flickered across his face.

“You'd throw your own life away just to get Damien's attention? Is that really how little you think of yourself, Elena?”

Something twisted in my chest. So that was all this was to them: me faking a suicide for attention.

The man in front of me was Owen Graves, the pack's Beta. He ran everything, big and small, Damien's right hand in all of it. He was also the boy I'd raised from a child.

Years ago his family had been framed for selling out the pack. The Alpha back then exiled every last one of them. Owen was spared only because he was too young to execute, but he lost his whole family that night.

I found him on a night thick with snow, huddled under a bridge in rags, gnawing on half a crust of black bread he'd snatched from a dog's mouth, his hands raw with frostbite. If I hadn't found him and brought him back to my pack when I did, he'd never have survived the winter.

I took whatever work I could find to put Owen through school. When he graduated, he joined Damien's company. The day he started, he drank too much, threw his arms around me, and couldn't stop thanking me.

“Elena, none of this would exist without you. You saved me. You're the one person I trust more than anyone. I swear, when I make something of myself, I'll never forget what you did. I'll pay you back, all of it.”

He couldn't have known that five years later the woman who saved him would become an enemy he'd refuse to so much as look at.

It all goes back to the day I took my mate vows with Damien, five years ago.

His affection for me had hit ninety. He threw a grand mate ceremony, and just as I let myself believe I'd finally won, that I was about to go home, Serena walked in.

She said I was the reason she'd left all those years ago, that I'd threatened her into it. She said the reason she'd stayed away so long was that I'd sent a pack of rogues to violate her, and she'd been too ashamed to show her face. Now that she'd heard Damien was taking me as his mate, she couldn't stand by and watch him be deceived. So she'd come back to expose the truth.

“Damien,” she breathed, “I can't be your mate in this life. But the next one, will you be with me then?”

And with that, she snatched a guard's silver knife and pressed it to her own throat, right there in front of everyone. It took the whole hall to talk her down.

Damien was livid. He called off the ceremony on the spot and threw me out. I ended up alone in a dark, damp basement. My brother struck my name from the family registry and swore he was done with me. Even Owen, the boy I'd raised with my own two hands, started tearing me down at every turn in front of the pack.

Overnight, every last point of affection dropped to zero.

“Today's Serena's engagement,” Owen said now. “If you really want to die, don't do it today and cast a shadow over her big day. And if this is just another act for our benefit, let me be clear: nobody here feels sorry for you.”