I died once

Nadia’s Pov

My name is Nadia, and I died once, and I remember all of it.

I remember the taste of blood in my mouth and the knife being driven into my chest.  Seraphine was standing over me, smiling like a child on her birthday, while my husband, the man I loved more than my own life, was nowhere to be found.

So when I open my eyes and find myself in my childhood bedroom, I don't scream or cry. I just lie there, very still, and think.

I haven't lived here in years. I left this house when I married Alpha Dorian Kane.

I sit up fast and look down at my hands.

They're young, soft, with no scars or a wedding ring.

I scramble out of bed and run to the mirror, and the girl staring back at me makes my blood run cold.

I'm seventeen again.

"No way," I whisper. "This isn't real."

I pinch my arm hard, and it hurts. I touch the mirror, and it's cold under my fingers. I press my hand flat against my chest, right where the knife went in.

Nothing, no wound, no scar. Just my heart beating fast.

I'm awake, alive, and back in my old bedroom, and in my old body, three years before I died.

Which means the wedding hasn't happened yet.

I do the math with shaking hands. The leaves outside my window are gold and red. The air smells like woodsmoke, and my mother's dried lavender, and I know it's autumn.

And if it's autumn of my seventeenth year, then the wedding to Alpha Dorian Kane is in ninety days.

If anyone could send me back... it would be the Moon Goddess.

We remember, a voice says inside me in a warm and steady voice. We remember everything.

I freeze. That's my wolf, but my wolf never spoke like this before. In my first life, she came late, and she was quiet, ordinary, and a shy little presence in the back of my mind. This voice is different; it sounds older, stronger, like she's been awake for a very long time, waiting for me to open my eyes.

Who are you? I ask.

Mneme, she says. You'll remember me too…Eventually.

I don't know what that means. But I don't have time to figure it out, because there's something much more important to deal with first.

I know how my story ends.

I married Dorian Kane because I loved him. I thought he loved me, too. He was handsome and powerful, and he chose me, a poor girl from a small pack, a nobody. I thought it was a miracle. I cried at my own wedding out of pure happiness, but I was wrong about everything.

Dorian had a fated mate. Her name was Seraphine Vale, and she was beautiful and high-born and everything I wasn't. He rejected her to marry me, and I was stupid enough to believe he did it for love.

He didn't. He did it for power. My bloodline plus his bloodline made him the most powerful Alpha alive. Our marriage merged two packs into one, and it put him on top of the world. That was all I ever was to him. A business deal with a heartbeat.

I only learned the truth the night I died. Seraphine told me herself, sitting on the edge of my bed with the knife in her hand, calm as anything.

"He has full control of the pack now," she said. "He doesn't need you anymore."

Then she killed me, and my husband, who was always home by midnight every night for three years, was conveniently, deliberately, somewhere else.

But now I'm back. The wedding is in ninety days, and this time, I know everything.

I look at the girl in the mirror. She has my mother's stubborn chin and my father's dark eyes, and I make her a promise.

"New rules," I tell her.

Rule one: I will not fall in love with Dorian Kane. Love is how they trapped me before. Love is the cage they built me, and I thanked them for it. Never again.

Rule two: I will find out what Seraphine really wants. Because something about my death never made sense. Dorian had already chosen me. The wedding was done, she had already lost. So why kill me three years later? Why risk everything for a man who threw her away?

And why did she smile like that? It wasn't the smile of a jealous woman. I've seen jealous women. It was the smile of someone finishing a job. Killing me was never about Dorian. I'd bet my second life on it. I was in her way, but in the way of what?

Rule three: I will not run. Last time, I let life happen to me. I was so happy to be chosen that I never asked why they chose me. I never asked why the most powerful Alpha in the land wanted a nobody from a dirt-poor pack. I never asked a single question, and my reward was a knife to my chest.

This time is different.  I will not be the prey but the hunter.

************

"Nadia!" my father shouts from downstairs. "Come down! The Aurelians sent a rider!"

My heart stops for a second, but not because of the rider, but from hearing my father's voice again. In my first life, my death broke him. He grew old in a single year and died of grief before my husband even finished building my tomb. I know that because Mneme knows it, somehow, the way she knows everything from beyond my death.

And now he's downstairs, shouting up at me like it's any ordinary morning, and I have to grip the washstand and breathe so I don't fall apart.

Later, I tell myself. Cry later, think now.

The Aurelians, the royal family, and the Alpha King's own bloodline.

Why would the royal family send a rider to our house? We're a small and poor pack. In my first life, the royals never even looked at us, not until my marriage made us useful to them.

Nadia, Mneme says, and all the warmth is gone from her voice. Something is wrong.

"What do you mean?"

This never happened, she says. In your first life, there was no rider. My whole body goes cold.

Because knowing exactly how things happened in my past life was my only weapon. I know this story, I lived it once. I know every betrayal, every lie, and how I die. My memory of the future is the one advantage a dead woman gets.

My stomach twists. If today changed...Then every certainty I brought back with me might be worthless.

I walk to the window on shaky legs and pull back the curtain.

There's a rider waiting in our yard. His black horse breathes clouds of steam into the cold morning air, and he is wearing a deep red cloak. The color of the royal family.

But he's not looking at our front door, the way a messenger should, rather he's looking up, at my window, and at me.

Our eyes meet through the glass. He doesn't look away, and neither does he look surprised. He looks like a man who came here to see me exactly.

Then, slowly, the rider raises one gloved hand and presses two fingers to his lips.

I stop breathing, because I've seen that exact gesture before. Only one person in my whole life has ever made it.

Seraphine made it right before she killed me.