CHAPTER FIVE

The morning after the wedding feast, Elara woke to the taste of iron in her mouth and the weight of a crown that did not yet exist.

Sunlight—thin, reluctant, the color of old bone—slid through the high arched windows of the royal bedchamber and pooled across the black furs. Cassius was gone. The sheets beside her were still warm, but the imprint of his body had already begun to fade, as though even the bed itself knew better than to hold onto him for long.

She sat up slowly. The wedding gown lay crumpled on the floor like a shed skin: white silk slashed with crimson embroidery, the Lycan moon-and-claw sigil repeated a hundred times across the train. It had been beautiful once. Now it looked like something that had survived a massacre.

Elara touched her face—her new face—and felt the unfamiliar smoothness of vampire skin beneath her fingertips. No scars from the silver chains Cassius had wrapped around her throat three years from now. No ragged mark where he had torn out her heart and offered it, still beating, to the god-beast sleeping beneath the palace.

This face belonged to Seraphine Valcour, Crown Princess of the starving vampire empire to the east. The real bride. The true mate. The one Cassius was supposed to kill in thirty nights beneath the coronation moon.

But Seraphine was not dead. Not yet.

She was chained in the oubliette beneath the old chapel, gagged with silver-threaded silk, eyes wide and furious behind the blindfold. Elara had visited her twice already: once to confirm the impossible, once to whisper apologies that tasted like lies.

Because Elara—the murdered Luna, the decoy, the ghost—had woken inside Seraphine’s body on the very morning of the wedding. Regression. Soul-theft. Divine cruelty. Call it what you liked. The result was the same: two souls, one face, and a prophecy that demanded only one heart.

Elara rose from the bed naked, walked to the tall silver mirror that dominated the eastern wall, and stared at the reflection that was not hers.

Seraphine stared back.

Porcelain skin. Hair like spilled midnight. Eyes the color of spilled wine. A mouth made for secrets and slow bleeding. Everything perfect, everything wrong.

She lifted a hand. The reflection obeyed.

“Good morning, Princess,” Elara said aloud, voice soft as falling ash. “Thank you for the dress.”

The mirror did not bleed today. That would come later.

A knock sounded at the door—three measured taps, the signal of the king’s personal guard.

“Your Grace,” came the muffled voice of Captain Thorne. “His Majesty requests your presence in the Rose Hall. The court awaits the first audience of the new queen.”

Queen.

The word tasted like spoiled honey.

Elara turned from the mirror. “Tell him I will attend in a moment.”

She dressed with deliberate care. Not in white this time. She chose black: a high-collared gown of velvet and spider-silk, embroidered with tiny silver claws along the sleeves. Mourning colors, technically. But Lycans respected strength more than tradition, and black suited the mood of a woman who had already died once.

When she stepped into the corridor, the guards dropped to one knee. Their eyes did not quite meet hers. They had knelt for Seraphine yesterday—Seraphine, who had arrived veiled and silent from the vampire delegation, who had spoken her vows in a voice like frost on glass. They thought they were kneeling for the same woman.

They were wrong.

The Rose Hall was a cavern of crimson stone and living thorns. Vines of blood-roses—bred centuries ago by some mad Lycan horticulturist—grew through cracks in the walls and ceiling, blooming perpetually, scenting the air with copper and nectar. Nobles packed the hall in tiers, fur cloaks and jeweled collars glinting beneath torchlight. At the far end, on a dais of black oak, sat Cassius.

He wore silver today. Armor chased with moon-runes, light as silk, strong as fate. His hair—black as a raven’s wing—fell loose to his shoulders. When he saw her enter, he rose.

Every wolf in the room felt it: the pull of the true mate bond, thrumming like a war drum beneath the skin.

Elara felt it too. A hook behind her ribs, tugging her forward. She hated it. She had loved him once—loved him enough to forgive every cruelty, every lie, right up until the moment he drove the silver dagger through her heart. Now the bond remained, a parasite she could not cut out without killing herself a second time.

She walked the long aisle between the courtiers. Whispers followed like smoke.

“She moves differently.”

“The scent is stronger.”

“Did you see her eyes? Like blood in water.”

She reached the dais and stopped one step below him. Protocol demanded she kneel. She did not.

Cassius’s mouth curved—half smile, half warning. “My queen,” he said, voice low enough that only she could hear the edge beneath it. “You kept me waiting.”

“I was admiring my reflection,” she answered. “It’s new.”

Something flickered across his face. Suspicion? Amusement? Desire? With Cassius, the three were often indistinguishable.

He extended a hand. She took it. His skin was fever-hot, the pulse in his wrist racing like a cornered animal. He drew her up beside him on the dais, turned her to face the court.

“My lords and ladies,” he called, voice carrying effortlessly through the hall. “Behold your Luna. Your queen. Seraphine of House Valcour, now Seraphine Blackthorn, bound to me by moon and blood.”

A roar went up—howls, cheers, the stamping of boots on stone. Goblets were raised. Somewhere, a war horn sounded in celebration.

Elara smiled. It felt like baring fangs.

When the noise died down, Cassius sat, pulling her down onto the shared throne beside him. The armrests were carved into snarling wolves; the seat was wide enough for two, but barely. Their thighs touched. Heat bled through layers of velvet and armor.

The first petition began.

For hours, they listened. Border disputes with the vampire enclaves. Reports of feral wolves in the northern marches. A noble house accused of harboring silver smugglers. Elara listened more than she spoke, watching faces, cataloguing weaknesses.

She noted who looked at Cassius with hunger. Who looked at her with fear. Who looked at both of them with calculation.

And she noted Cassius himself.

How he leaned toward her when he thought no one watched. How his hand rested on the pommel of his dagger when certain names were spoken. How, once, when a minor lord dared suggest the vampire alliance might be a mistake, Cassius’s eyes went flat and wolf-gold, and the man pissed himself on the spot.

Power, Elara thought. That is what he loves most. Power and the bond and the prophecy, in that order.

She filed it away.

When the audience finally ended and the hall began to empty, Cassius turned to her.

“You were quiet,” he said.

“I was learning.”

He studied her face. “You seem… changed.”

“Marriage changes a woman.”

A soft laugh escaped him. “Does it? I wouldn’t know. I’ve only ever had one mate.”

Liar, she thought. You will have two. And you will kill both.

Aloud, she said, “Take me somewhere private.”

His pupils dilated instantly. The bond flared between them like struck flint.

He rose, offered his hand again. This time she took it without hesitation.

They left the hall through a side door that opened onto the royal gardens—wild, overgrown, thorn-choked. Blood-roses grew thicker here, some blooms as large as a man’s head. The air was heavy with their perfume.

Cassius led her along a path of crushed obsidian until they reached a secluded arbor. Moonstone benches. A fountain shaped like a howling wolf, water running red from mineral deposits.

He stopped beneath an arch of thorns and pulled her close.

“I have waited years for this,” he said against her throat. “To have you truly. No veils. No politics. Just us.”

His mouth found the pulse beneath her jaw. Teeth grazed skin—not quite breaking it.

Elara closed her eyes and let him.

She remembered this. The way he kissed like a man starving. The way his hands mapped her body as though memorizing territory he intended to conquer. She remembered how it had felt to believe he loved her.

Now it felt like being devoured piece by piece.

When he pulled back, his breathing was ragged. “Tonight,” he said. “The bonding rite. Under the moon. I will mark you fully. No more distance. No more doubt.”

The bonding rite. The night he would sink his fangs into her throat and tie their souls irrevocably. In the original timeline, he had done it to her—the decoy Luna—three weeks before he killed her.

This time, he believed he was marking his true mate.

This time, the mark would take.

Elara smiled up at him, soft and sweet and lethal.

“I can’t wait,” she whispered.

His arms tightened around her until her ribs creaked.

Later, when he had gone to meet with his war council, Elara slipped away.

She knew the palace better than anyone—had died in it, after all. She took servants’ corridors, avoided guards, descended spiral stairs that smelled of damp stone and old blood.

The old chapel lay abandoned beneath the eastern wing. Once it had been a place of Lycan worship. Now it was a tomb for inconvenient things.

She lifted the iron grate in the floor behind the altar and descended into the oubliette.

Seraphine was chained to the far wall, wrists and ankles bound in silver that smoked against vampire skin. Her head snapped up at the sound of footsteps.

The blindfold had slipped. One crimson eye glared through tangled black hair.

Elara removed the gag gently.

Seraphine spat blood. “You bitch.”

“Hello to you too.”

“You stole my life. My face. My wedding night.” Seraphine’s voice was raw from screaming. “When I get free—”

“You won’t,” Elara said kindly. “Not unless I let you.”

She crouched, bringing their faces level. Identical. Perfectly identical.

Seraphine’s lip curled. “He’ll know. Cassius will taste the difference. He’ll smell the rot in your soul.”

“Maybe,” Elara said. “Or maybe he’ll taste what he wants to taste. Men like him always do.”

Seraphine lunged against the chains. The silver burned deeper. She hissed in pain.

“Why are you doing this?” she demanded. “What do you gain?”

Elara considered the question.

“Revenge,” she said finally. “And survival. And perhaps… something more.”

She reached out and brushed a strand of hair from Seraphine’s face. The gesture was almost tender.

“I was his mate once,” she said quietly. “The decoy. The spare. He loved me enough to use me, not enough to keep me. He cut out my heart to wake the beast. Fed it to the moon.”

Seraphine’s eye widened.

Elara smiled. “Now I’m going to make him love you enough to die for you.”

She replaced the gag, tightened the blindfold.

As she turned to leave, Seraphine made a muffled sound—rage or terror, impossible to tell.

Elara paused at the ladder.

“Thirty nights,” she said over her shoulder. “That’s all either of us has. Try not to go mad before then.”

She climbed back into the chapel, replaced the grate, and walked out into the dying light.

That evening, the palace prepared for the bonding rite.

The great courtyard had been cleared. A circle of moonstone slabs. Torches of silver flame. The entire court would witness.

Elara bathed in rosewater and blood—ritual cleansing. Maids dressed her in a gown of translucent silver mesh over bare skin. No undergarments. Nothing to hide the mark when it came.

When she stepped into the courtyard, silence fell.

Cassius waited at the center, shirtless, wearing only black leather trousers and the torque of his office. His chest was scarred—old battles, old betrayals. His eyes burned gold.

The bond pulled her across the stones like a leash.

They stopped a breath apart.

The high priest—an ancient she-wolf with milk-white eyes—began the chant. Old words. Hungry words.

Cassius took Elara’s hands. His claws pricked her palms.

“Seraphine Valcour Blackthorn,” he said, voice rough with emotion. “I claim you as my mate, my queen, my forever.”

Elara looked up at him. For a moment, the ghost of the woman she had been ached inside her chest.

Then she smiled.

“And I accept,” she said.

He pulled her in. Mouth on hers. Fangs extending.

He bit.

Pain flared white-hot at her throat, then melted into something darker. Pleasure. Power. The bond snapped taut between them like a living thing.

She felt him flood into her—his hunger, his loneliness, his terror of the prophecy. And she let him feel her in return: desire, devotion, the promise of eternity.

All lies.

All weapons.

When he finally pulled back, blood—her blood—stained his lips. The mark glowed silver on her throat: the Lycan sigil entwined with vampire thorns.

The court howled approval.

Cassius pressed his forehead to hers.

“Mine,” he whispered.

Elara touched the mark gently.

“Yours,” she agreed.

Later, in the royal bedchamber, he took her slowly, reverently, as though afraid she might break. She let him worship her borrowed body. She arched and sighed and whispered his name like a prayer.

And when he finally slept—exhausted, sated, believing himself loved beyond measure—she slipped from the bed.

She dressed in black again. Took a dagger from his armor stand. Walked barefoot through the silent palace to the oubliette.

Seraphine was weeping behind the gag.

Elara removed it.

“Don’t,” Seraphine rasped. “Please.”

“I’m not going to kill you,” Elara said. “Not tonight.”

She knelt, unlocked one of the silver manacles. The metal hissed against vampire flesh.

Seraphine stared.

“What are you doing?”

“Giving you a choice,” Elara said. “Stay here and rot until he comes for your heart. Or help me kill him first.”

She unlocked the second manacle.

Seraphine rubbed her burned wrists, eyes never leaving Elara’s face.

“Why would I trust you?”

“You shouldn’t,” Elara said. “But we’re out of better options.”

She offered the dagger hilt-first.

Seraphine took it.

They regarded each other across the damp stone—two identical women wearing the same face, the same rage, the same doom.

Finally, Seraphine spoke.

“Thirty nights,” she said.

“Twenty-nine now,” Elara corrected.

Seraphine smiled. It was not a nice smile.

“Then we’d better start planning.”

Above them, the moon watched through cracked stained glass, fat and bloody and waiting.