Chapter 2 — Three Years Earlier

I woke up screaming.

Not the ragged scream of dying. A different one — raw, startled, the scream of someone who expects a wound and finds only air.

Sunlight. That was the first wrongness. There had been no sunlight where I died; there had been snow and torches and Kael's face. But sunlight poured now through unfamiliar gauze curtains, warm and ordinary and completely indifferent to the fact that I had just watched myself bleed to death.

My hands flew to my stomach.

No wound.

No blood. No torn fabric, no ragged breath catching on broken ribs. Only my own racing heart, hammering against skin that had no business being unmarked, no business continuing at all.

I sat up too fast and the room tilted, and it was only then that I noticed the room itself was wrong. My bed at the Draven pack house had been narrow, plain, a guest's bed in a house that had never quite let me feel welcome, every plank and seam of it a quiet reminder that I did not truly belong there. This bed was wide, canopied, familiar in a way that made my stomach drop before my mind caught up to why.

This was my old room. My room from before — before the courtship, before the ceremony, before I had ever set foot inside Draven territory, before any of it had happened at all.

I stumbled to the mirror on unsteady legs, my bare feet slapping against floorboards I somehow still remembered the exact creak of, and the face that stared back at me stole what was left of my breath.

Younger. Rounder in the cheeks, less shadowed beneath the eyes, entirely unmarked by a year of quiet humiliation and three days of a truth I'd paid for with my life. This was not a woman who had survived a mating rejection in front of an entire pack. This was a girl who had not yet been given the chance to be broken, who still believed, in whatever small and private way, that the world might eventually be kind to her.

Three years younger, if the face in that glass told the truth.

My breath would not come evenly. I gripped the edge of the vanity hard enough that my knuckles went white, and made myself look — really look — for anything that would explain this as a trick, a dream, one last cruel flicker of a dying mind refusing to accept its own ending. I touched my own cheek. I touched my own collarbone. I searched for some seam in the illusion, some place where the dream might finally tear and drop me back into the cold and the snow where I belonged.

Nothing tore. Nothing wavered. The girl in the mirror only stared back at me, frightened and whole and entirely unaware of everything that was coming for her.

There was a calendar pinned above the desk, its pages open to a date I knew before I let myself read it, because some deeper animal part of me already understood what my mind was still refusing to.

The day before I first met Alpha Kael Draven.

I stared at the date until the numbers blurred, and something in my chest that had been clenched tight since the moment the knife found me finally, slowly, began to loosen — not relief, not yet, but something adjacent to it, something that made room, for the first time in what felt like a very long dying, for a single clear thought.

Three years. I had been given three years I was never supposed to have, standing at the very beginning of a future I had already lived to its bitter, bloody end. Three years to do differently whatever I had done wrong. Three years that no one else in this house, in this entire world, even knew had been handed to me.

I knew what was coming. I knew which introductions were traps and which allies were already lost before they ever had the chance to prove themselves. I knew the exact words that would come out of Kael Draven's mouth at a fire three years from now, and I knew exactly who would be smiling behind him, wearing my mother's necklace, when he said them.

I looked at my own reflection — young, unmarked, dangerously naive — and felt something colder and steadier than grief settle into the space where my fear had been. It moved through me slowly, the way frost moves across a window, each small crystal locking into the next until the whole pane had changed.

I smiled, and did not recognize the shape of my own mouth.

This time, I knew exactly who was going to betray me.

And I knew exactly what I intended to do about it.

Someone knocked at the door.

I did not move at first. The knock came again, patient, familiar in a way that sent a small, treacherous ache through my chest before I could stop it — because I knew that knock. I had known it my whole life, long before I had any reason to fear what might be standing on the other side of it. I had simply never imagined I would hear it again after the life I remembered ending.

My eyes dropped once more to the mirror, to the unmarked girl staring back at me with her wide, frightened eyes, and I made myself breathe the way I had not been able to breathe in the snow. In, slow. Out, slower. Whatever waited on the other side of that door, I would need a steadier face than the one currently looking back at me — a face that could pass for ordinary, for unremarkable, for exactly the ignorable, overlooked daughter I had spent a year learning to become out of simple necessity.

I thought, with a strange, dizzying clarity, of everything I now knew that this girl in the mirror did not. I knew the shape of a betrayal three years before it would arrive. I knew which smiles to distrust and which kindnesses to question. I knew, with a certainty that made my stomach twist, that the knock at my door belonged to someone I had once loved without reservation, and would need, from this morning forward, to love far more carefully than before.

The knock came a third time, gentler now, almost hesitant, and I understood I could not stand frozen before this mirror forever, cataloguing a grief that had not yet happened to the person standing in this room. Whatever this second chance truly was — gift, curse, some cruel accident of whatever gods bothered themselves with the dying wishes of minor daughters — I would need to step into it eventually. There was no version of survival that did not begin with answering the door.