Chapter 1

Tory POV

"Help!" The scream tore out of me before I even registered the pain.

A meteor had slammed into the ground beside me, and a shard of burning rock caught my leg, searing straight through skin.

My gown, the long white one I'd worn to the annual pack ball, the one Aldrich had said made me look like I was trying too hard, was already catching fire at the hem.

Everywhere was chaos.

The sky wasn't a sky anymore; it was a ceiling of falling fire, and the pack grounds I'd walked a thousand times were unrecognizable, craters where the fountain used to be, the ballroom collapsed in on itself, bodies I couldn't let myself look at twice.

Not a single thing was left standing. Not a single thing made sense.

"Nooo......" Aldrich's voice cracked through the smoke, and for one heartbeat, one stupid, starving heartbeat, I let myself believe he was running toward me.

I let myself believe that six years of his cold shoulder, six years of silence at the dinner table and empty space beside me in bed, had meant nothing at all.

That underneath it, he'd loved me the whole time.

I stretched my hands toward him.

Come on. Get me to the safe room.

The one we'd built together, brick by brick, with our own hands, laughing about the day we'd never need it.

That day was here.

He crossed right past me.

Another meteor hit the ground behind my feet, close enough that the heat licked up my spine.

"Aldrich!" My voice broke.

Tears streaked hot down a face already slick with blood and ash.

There was no hope left in me, and still some pathetic, desperate part of me kept asking the same question, why didn't you save me? I'm your Luna. Doesn't that mean anything to you?

Then he walked past me. With her in his arms.

Sabine. Untouched. Not a single bruise, not a drop of blood, while I was falling apart in front of him.

"Aldrich, please don't do this to me."

He didn't even turn his head.

He carried her through the safe room door while the meteors kept coming down like rain, while smoke filled my lungs until I couldn't tell if I was choking or screaming anymore.

And then, right there in the doorway, with me still outside in the fire

He kissed her.

How could anyone be that cruel?

How could the man who'd once carved my name into the oak tree behind the training yard look at me burning and choose someone else's mouth instead?

I didn't get to ask.

A meteor hit my back and every thought in my head went white.

I couldn't scream anymore.

I couldn't run. I couldn't even move; I could only feel my own breath leaving me, slow and final, like a door easing shut.

Somewhere underneath all of it, small and stubborn, a voice that didn't sound afraid at all whispered:

Elowen blood does not beg.

***

"What the......" I shot up in bed so fast my head spun, my own scream still ringing in my ears.

My hands flew to my chest, to my arms, to my legs, no fire, no blood, no meteor-shredded gown.

Just sweat-damp sheets tangled around my knees and my heart slamming against my ribs like it was trying to get out.

I was still in the same pack house.

The same bed I'd shared with Aldrich as Luna of the Europa Moon Pack.

Everything was exactly where it should be and that was somehow the most terrifying part.

I looked across the room. The calendar was still pinned to the wall where it always was, and when my eyes found today's date, my stomach dropped straight through the floor.

Ninety-two days before the annual ball.

The same ball.

The same night the sky had opened up and ended the world.

I pinched the skin on my wrist, hard enough to bruise, half hoping the sting would wake me up somewhere else. It didn't.

This was real. This was happening.

And then she walked in.

"Shut up, you good for nothing wolf." Sabine's voice snapped like a whip at the maidservant trailing behind her, a cocktail glass sweating in her manicured hand. "I told you orange and melon. Not melon and orange. Are you deaf, or just stupid?"

Sabine.

The same woman Aldrich had brought into this pack house on the exact day I'd started feeling like a stranger in my own home.

The exact same day he'd started looking at me like I was something he'd outgrown.

Just a childhood friend, he'd said. I'd been foolish enough to believe him.

"Now go make a reservation at the Callum, then swing by the orphanage and drop off the donation boxes. Today. Not tomorrow." She slammed the door behind the poor wolf without so much as a glance back.

How had I never noticed this before?

The way she moved through these halls like she already owned them.

The way she barked orders at staff who weren't even hers to command.

The way Aldrich's face softened, actually softened, whenever she was in the room, and turned to stone the second I walked in.

Something cold and sharp settled behind my ribs. I had ninety-two days. I couldn't waste a single one of them.

Not in this life either.

"Hiii, Tory. How'd you sleep?" Sabine's whole face rearranged itself into warmth the moment she turned to me, her hand landing on my shoulder like we were sisters, like she actually cared whether I'd slept at all.

"I'm fine, Sabine. Thank you." I peeled her hand off my shoulder as gently as I could manage, though every instinct in me wanted to fling it away.

"Great, because Aldrich wants the bedsheets in this whole house washed today. And the windows. All of them."

Of course he did.

For six years, that had been my entire worth to him, Luna in title, laundress in practice, while actual maidservants dusted the halls I was apparently too incompetent to be trusted with anything else.

"Thanks, Sabine." I kept my voice level, even as my jaw ached from clenching it. "Can you tell me where Aldrich is?"

"Training yard. Don't dawdle on that laundry." She flashed a smile that didn't reach her eyes and breezed out, leaving her perfume hanging in the air like a threat.

I found him exactly where she'd said, shirtless in the morning light, moving through combat drills with the kind of effortless, brutal grace that used to make my chest ache with something like love.

Too bad he was the same man who'd walked past me while I burned alive.

I crossed the yard toward him, scenes of my first life still clinging to my skin like smoke, but whatever it meant, whatever this impossible second chance was, I already knew one thing for certain.

I was done being anyone's dirty laundry.

"Aldrich." His name came out steadier than I felt.

He turned, and there it was, the same ice I'd been drowning in for six years, like I was furniture that had spoken out of turn.

I lifted my chin.

"I reject you as my mate."