Chapter 3 — My Sister's Smile

I had exactly four seconds to arrange my face into something that didn't look like a woman who had just been reborn out of her own murder, and I used every one of them.

"Come in," I said, and was almost surprised at how steady my voice sounded.

The door opened, and Seraphine swept into the room the way she swept into every room — as though it had been waiting for her.

She was younger too. Of course she was; we had grown up together, close enough in age that people had always assumed we were true sisters rather than the daughters of a second marriage stitched awkwardly into one house. Three years had not yet touched the soft, open warmth of her face, had not yet given her the polish and the calculation I remembered from later. This Seraphine looked exactly like what she had always pretended to be — bright, unguarded, entirely without the careful architecture I would later learn lived beneath her smiles.

My sister. My friend. The one person in my first life I had never quite been able to stop loving, even after I understood what she had done. I had spent three days dying with that contradiction lodged in my chest like a second blade, and here she was now, warm and solid and smelling faintly of the lavender water she always rinsed her hair with, as though none of it had ever happened at all.

"You're finally awake," Seraphine said, crossing the room to sit on the edge of my bed as though she had done it a thousand times, which — I realized with a small, disorienting jolt — she probably had. "You slept so late I told Father you were sickening for something. Are you all right? You look pale."

I died three days ago in a life that hasn't happened yet, and you were standing behind the man who let it happen, wearing our mother's necklace.

"I had a strange dream," I said instead. "That's all."

Seraphine's smile was soft, immediate, entirely without shadow. She reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear with the casual tenderness of someone who had never once had to fight for anything she wanted, because she had always simply been given it. In my first life it had taken me two years to understand that this ease was not innocence. It was appetite, wearing a gentle face — though sitting here now, watching her study me with nothing but ordinary sisterly concern, I found myself unable to summon the certainty I'd carried into this room only moments before.

I made myself smile back. It cost more than I expected, a small, sharp ache behind my ribs where no wound now lived.

"Well, wake up properly," Seraphine said, already rising to throw open the curtains wider, flooding the room with more of that indifferent, ordinary sunlight, "because you're going to want to be presentable today. Father's had a letter — the northern packs are sending envoys through our territory next week, on their way to some Concord business or other, and one of them is apparently quite important." Her eyes glittered with the particular delight she reserved for anything resembling gossip, the way they always had before every dinner, every gathering, every chance to perform the easy brightness that made rooms love her. "Alpha Kael Draven. You've heard the name, surely. Everyone has. They say he's never once been photographed smiling."

The floor seemed to tilt very slightly beneath me.

In the life I remembered — the life that had ended with a knife and snow and his voice saying she was never my mate — I had not met Kael Draven for another two months. Not next week. Two months from now, at a Concord gathering my father had nearly declined to attend, in a different territory entirely, under circumstances I had turned over so many times in my head, in the long cold nights of my first isolation, that I could recite the order of events like a prayer I no longer believed in.

He was not supposed to be coming here. Not yet. Not this early.

I kept my face as still as I could manage, though my pulse had begun to climb into my throat, loud enough that I half expected Seraphine to hear it from across the room.

"Kael Draven," I repeated carefully, as though tasting an unfamiliar name for the first time, when in truth I had tasted little else for the last year of my life and all three days of my death. "I don't think I've heard of him."

Seraphine laughed, delighted, and swatted my arm with the easy affection of a girl who had never once needed to lie to me the way I was now lying to her.

"Liora Vale, you live under a rock," she said. "Everyone's heard of the Draven Alpha. Father says House Vale can't afford to make a poor impression when he passes through — apparently there's talk that the Draven pack is looking to secure a marriage alliance sometime in the next few years, and Father would very much like it to be with us."

It will be, I thought, with something that tasted almost like nausea. It already was. And it cost me everything.

Seraphine's smile did not waver, sweet and untroubled, as she reached for my hairbrush and began, without asking, to work through the tangles at the back of my head — a small, familiar intimacy from a hundred mornings I remembered perfectly, the brush moving in the same unhurried rhythm it always had, as though three years and a death and an entire ruined life had never come between us at all.

"Wouldn't it be funny," she said lightly, brush moving in slow, practiced strokes, "if it ended up being you he wanted?"

I went very still.

Because in my first life, Seraphine had never said anything like that to me. Not once, not in a year of watching Kael's attention slide past me toward her like water finding the lowest ground. She had never joked about it. She had never needed to joke about it, because she had already known — long before I did — exactly which sister he would eventually choose.

She was saying it now, lightly, carelessly, as if the question had no weight at all.

Which meant either my memory of that year had been wrong from the very first day, or the future I thought I knew by heart had already, impossibly, begun to change — and I did not yet know which possibility frightened me more.