Whose Face Is That

Melindana’s POV

I woke up on a cold hard floor, something damp soaking through the fabric at my back and a pain in my head so severe that when I tried to open my eyes the darkness behind them felt safer.

The sky above me was black and scattered with stars and I had absolutely no memory of where I was or how I had gotten there.

I lay still for a moment, breathing, running through what I knew, which was nothing. No location, no memory of arriving here, nothing before the cold and the dark and this unbearable pain at the back of my skull.

I sat up slowly and that was when I saw the blood, dark and pooled on the ground where my head had been, soaked through the collar and chest of a dress that even ruined was clearly worth a big fortune.

I touched the back of my skull where the pain was worst and my fingers came back wet with blood. Then I touched my forehead, searching for a wound because the amount of blood underneath me made no sense otherwise, and found nothing.

I immediately noticed the hands, and brought them up to my face. The hands were tiny with smooth skin, soft pinkish palm, the kind of hands that had never done a hard day of work in their life.

Two of the fingers were decorated with gold rings, nails that were clean, shaped and manicured, and a smell on the skin like something expensive. I turned them over slowly, then back again, and sat with that confusion for a moment because the hands I knew were not these hands and yet here they were at the end of my arms responding when I moved my fingers.

I looked around, the street around me was empty and very dark, no movement anywhere, except the occasional wind and the distant hum of a car somewhere far off. I was trying to figure out what my next move was when I heard footsteps behind me and a voice followed, a deep baritone sexy voice.

Heyyy. The voice said. “Miss? Are you alright?” A pause. “Miss?”

I turned my head around slowly. A man was walking toward me from the direction of a dark car parked further up the road and even in the low light I could see he was tall, broad shouldered. He reached me and crouched down and the first thing I noticed up close was his face, his dark green eyes, a well trimmed beard and something about his hair, the way tiny strands fell on both sides of his face.

“Miss?” He said it again, sexier this time, his eyes moved from my face first then at the blood all over my dress and back at my face. “Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you.” My own voice startled me, it came out small and soft and I did not recognise it at all. I cleared my throat like that would help.

He studied me for a moment. “Bella?” He said the name carefully, like he was confirming something. “It’s you, isn’t it.”

Arabella.

I still said nothing.

“What are you doing out here at this hour, what happened to you?” He was already standing up, one hand coming to my elbow to help me up, steady and careful. “You’re bleeding, how did this happen, are you sure you can stand?”

“I’m fine.” I let him help me to my feet and immediately understood that fine was doing a lot of work in that sentence because this body had no strength in it, slight and soft in a way that was genuinely disorienting to be inside.

“You have too much blood on you to be fine.” He said it without drama, already walking back toward his car, and he opened the passenger door before I even decided whether or not to follow him. He looked back at me. “Come on, I’m taking you home.”

I got in.

He drove without talking much which I was grateful for l because I had too many questions I couldn’t ask out loud and not enough answers to fill any kind of conversation.

I spent most of the ride looking at those small gold ringed hands in my lap trying to understand what had happened to me.

He turned through a gate eventually, I looked up and the house that appeared at the end of the driveway made me stop breathing for a second. It was enormous, lit from outside, painted all white with glass windows that you could easily mistake as a door.

“This is you.” He glanced at me as he said it, one hand still on the wheel. “That’s home, Bella.”

There was that name again.

Before I could think about it the front door opened and people started coming out, a man came out first, a woman hovering just behind him, four maids running out after them. The man who had come outside first looked from the car to me and then to my driver and immediately straightened his posture.

The man who had driven me leaned out of the window briefly and nodded once. “Found her on Crest Road. She’s bleeding, have someone look at her.”

The other man thanked him, several times. The way they greeted each other made it clear they knew each other well.

A maid reached me before I had fully stepped away from the car, hands already reaching for my arm, her eyes wide and worried.

“Oh my God Luna you’re bleeding, are you okay? Come, come let me take you inside, let me clean you up, come.”

She led me through the front door and up a staircase, into a room that stopped me in the doorway for a full second.

Everything in it was so expensive. All the bags lined one wall, shoes arranged in a glass case beside them, jewellery laid out on a velvet tray on the dresser like a display.

The bed had more pillows than one person could ever need and the whole room smelled like a perfume I didn’t recognise but that apparently lived in this body’s skin.

The maid knelt at my feet to remove my shoes and I stepped back immediately.

“Get up please, you don’t have to do that.”

She looked up at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read, hands folded in front of her, watching my face like she was trying to figure something out.

“Those people outside,” I said. “The man in the car and the one who came to meet us, who are they.”

She hesitated and blinked. “Luna, are you feeling alright?”

“Just answer me.”

“The man in the car is the Lycan King,” she said carefully. “King Aurelius. And the man outside, the one who came out to greet him….” she paused “—that’s…that’s your husband. Alpha Luca.”

Husband.

I turned toward the large mirror on the far wall and walked to it and stood in front of it.

The face looking back at me was beautiful. High cheekbones, full mouth, ginger hair falling past her shoulders in loose curls, dark eyes that were currently wide and searching and entirely unfamiliar.

I had never seen this woman before in my life.