Cold Revenge

Chapter 2

Sunlight hits me like a slap.

I flinch away from it, throwing an arm over my eyes, and for one full second I brace for the beeping, the mask, the hands pinning me down. None of it comes. Just warmth. Just a soft mattress under my back and sheets that smell like the lavender wash I haven't used in months.

I sit up too fast and the room tilts. Gold curtains. A vanity crowded with bottles I recognize. The Alpha residence. My old room, the one I shared with Adrian before he stopped bothering to sleep in it.

I grab my phone off the nightstand with a hand that isn't shaking, isn't bruised, isn't hooked to anything.

The date on the screen stops my heart for a different reason this time.

A year. I'm a year back.

I'm off the bed and in front of the mirror before I've decided to move. My own face stares back at me, and it's wrong in the best way — color in my cheeks, no grey under my eyes, no tremor in my hands. I press two fingers to my throat and feel my pulse going strong and even. Whatever poison ate me alive in that hospital bed hasn't touched me yet. I haven't even started the formula that killed me.

I stand there a long time just breathing. In. Out. Nobody running down a hallway. No monitor screaming my name in beeps. No mask pressed over my mouth, no paddles, no white ceiling light swallowing the room.

The memories come anyway, uninvited. Adrian's voice on the phone, low and pleased with himself. Ines laughing like she owned the moment. The video lighting up my screen, my own bedroom turned into a stage for something I was never meant to see. I press my palm flat against the mirror like I can push the image back through the glass and out of my head.

Then I remember the headboard. The video. Adrian's voice telling Ines I was a liability he married.

My hands curl into fists at my sides.

Not this time.

I get dressed fast, throw my hair back, and I'm in the lab within the hour, badge scanned, door locked behind me. The formula files are right where they should be, four years of work compressed into folders I built myself, cell by cell, failure by failure. I plug in a drive and start the copy.

The transfer stalls at nine percent. Encrypted.

I try the drive twice more, click through every folder I built, and every one of them locks me out the same way. Someone's been in here recently, careful enough to lock the doors behind them and sloppy enough to leave the trail. I know exactly who.

I stare at the screen for a second before the laugh comes out of me, short and humorless. He's already doing it. A year early. Already locking me out of my own work like he's rehearsing for the version of this where he stands on a stage holding up a vial with my blood, sweat, and four years of insomnia in it, calling it his own.

Fine. Let him try. The data on this machine is still garbage — half-finished ratios, dead ends, nothing he can use until I adjust the compound myself. He can encrypt an empty box for all it matters.

I'm halfway to my car when my phone rings. A number I don't recognize, except I do — it needles at something old and buried, a memory I can't place until it's already ringing a second time.

I answer on the third ring, out of habit more than curiosity.

"Is this Miss Vera?"

A man's voice, steady, formal, older. My mouth goes dry before he even finishes the sentence.

"We've been trying to reach you for a long time," he says. "My name is Silas. I'm a Beta of the Moonlight Pack."

Moonlight.

The name lands in my chest like a dropped stone. That's the pack Adrian spent years chasing, sending envoys, offering trade deals, begging for an alliance he could never get a foothold in. Legend says the moon goddess blessed that bloodline with healing gifts no other pack has ever matched.

"I think you have the wrong person," I say. "I'm an Omega. I don't have a pack."

"You are the sole heir to the Moonlight Alpha line," Silas says, like it's a fact as plain as the weather. "We would like you to come home and claim your title."

I almost laugh at him. I grew up in a Silver Moon orphanage wing with a cot and a number instead of a name until Adrian's family took me in as a charity case and later called it a marriage. Nobody ever came looking for me. Nobody ever sent a single letter in eighteen years.

A photo lands in my messages before I can answer. A little girl, maybe three years old, gap-toothed, gripping a man's hand in front of a house I don't remember and somehow do. Something in my chest twists at the shape of her eyes. They're mine.

I say yes before I fully understand what I'm agreeing to.

A hundred million lands in my account one second later.

*

The house is quiet when I walk in, and then it isn't. Adrian's home early, Ines hovering at his elbow like she's been surgically attached there, Micah trailing behind with his arms crossed. The three of them together in one frame makes something in my stomach turn over, slow and sick.

"Where have you been?" Adrian says, already annoyed. "I called you all afternoon."

"Lab," I say. "Trying to move the formula along faster. For you."

His face softens immediately, the way it always does when I hand him a reason to stop being angry at me. It used to feel like relief. Now it just feels like watching a trick I've already seen the ending of.

Ines steps forward with a mug, steam curling off the top. "Silver Moon owes everything to you," she says, sweet as syrup. "We really don't say it enough."

Her eyes say something else entirely. I see the shift in her grip half a second before she moves, the mug tilting, hot coffee arcing toward my face.

I catch her wrist mid-swing and twist. The coffee goes back the way it came, straight down her front. She screams, more from shock than pain, and Adrian's mouth opens like he's about to tear into me.

"She should be more careful," I say, before he gets the chance. "If that had hit my hands I'd be useless in the lab for weeks. Is that what you want, Adrian? Me useless?"

His mouth shuts. He turns on Ines instead, tells her to apologize, and she storms off crying like I'm the one who assaulted her.

Micah rounds on me next, chin jutting out, eyes hard in a way that seven-year-olds shouldn't manage without practice. "You're mean," he spits. "You made her cry."

In another life I would have knelt down and apologized to him. I would have told myself he didn't mean it, that he was just a child protecting someone he loved. Now I just look at him and wonder how long he's known Ines was his real mother, how long the two of them laughed about me behind my back while I tucked him in at night.

"You have combat training tonight," I say. "Two extra hours. Gamma will run it."

He stomps out screaming that he hates me. Adrian goes after him without a backward glance.

I follow at a distance, unhurried, and find them in the garden — except it's not both of them. It's Adrian and Ines, her face still blotchy from the coffee, tucked into his arms like she's the one who needs comforting.

"Be patient," he's murmuring into her hair. "She's just an Omega. Useful for now. The second the council signs off on that antidote, I divorce her and it's you standing next to me."

I don't feel my hands moving. I just feel the phone already in my grip, already raised, the shutter sound sharp and clean in the quiet garden.

Neither of them turns around.

I lower the phone, save the photo, and walk back into the house without a word. In my room, I pull up Silas's number and hit call before I can talk myself out of it.

He picks up on the first ring, like he's been waiting.

"I'm coming home," I tell him. "Start preparing whatever I need to sign."

There's a pause on the other end, and then Silas says something that stops me cold.

"There's one more thing you should know befor

e you do, Miss Vera. Something about your father.”