HEART BREAK IN DEATH

Chapter 1

The monitor beside my bed will not stop screaming.

My fingers dig into the sheets. My lungs pull at air that won't come, short and ragged, each breath smaller than the last. Through the window the sky has gone the color of ash. I've been counting the hours by the shifts of the nurses. I lost count two shifts ago.

My skin has turned the color of paper. The IV line taped to the back of my hand bruised black days ago and no one has bothered to move it. I'm too weak now to ask. A nurse checks on me every hour, adjusts the oxygen line under my nose, writes something on a chart, and leaves without meeting my eyes. Nobody expects me to last the week.

I need to hear Adrian's voice. Just once more. And Micah's — I want my son's voice, want him to hold my hand the way he used to when he was small, before the pack elders decided a future Alpha shouldn't touch a dying Omega too long.

My hand shakes reaching for the phone on the nightstand. I dial. Busy.

I try again. Busy.

The third time, the line clicks open.

Not Adrian's voice. A woman's, low, breathless, cut off mid-laugh.

My grip tightens on the phone until my knuckles go white. "Ines?"

Silence on the other end. Then fabric shifting, and Adrian's voice, closer to the receiver than he realizes, thick and unhurried, like he has all the time in the world.

"Ines," he says. "You're so pretty. So good. Better than that liability of an Omega I married."

"But she's still your wife," Ines says. She doesn't sound sorry. She sounds like she's fishing for the answer she already knows is coming.

"Not for long," Adrian says. "She'll be dead soon. Then it's just us."

I stop breathing before the machines even notice.

"Oops," Ines says, right into the phone now, like she's been holding it the whole time, like she wanted me to hear every word. "Wrong pocket."

The call doesn't end. It keeps going, seconds stretching into a full minute, and I can't make myself hang up. Adrian's breathing changes on the other end. I hear my own husband laugh, low and satisfied, at something Ines says that I don't catch, and I understand, all at once, that this isn't an accident. This is a message.

The phone slides from my hand and hits the blanket.

My screen lights up a second later. A message from Ines. No words. Just a video file, already loaded, already playing before I can stop it.

My own bedroom. My own headboard, the one I picked out myself two winters ago, knocking against the wall in a rhythm I recognize because I used to lie awake counting it when it was mine. Adrian's face, turned toward the camera like he wanted it framed just right. Ines under him, watching the lens instead of him, smiling at it like she's the one who's about to win something. My name isn't said once. It doesn't need to be. The sheets are mine. The room is mine. I am the only thing missing from a marriage that apparently never needed me in it at all.

My chest seizes.

The monitor's beeping speeds up, then stumbles, then speeds up again, erratic, climbing toward a pitch that brings feet running down the hallway outside my door. The door bangs open. Hands press down on my shoulders, pinning me flat. A mask covers my face. Someone shouts numbers I don't understand.

I try to say his name. Nothing comes out.

The ceiling light above my bed blurs at the edges, then doubles, then goes white, and the last thing I hear clearly is a nurse saying get the paddles, get them now, and then nothing at all.

*

I'm still in the room.

I don't understand it at first — the doctors moving through me like I'm smoke, the crash cart wheeled away, a sheet pulled up over a face that's mine and isn't anymore. I look down at my own hands and see straight through them to the tile floor.

A doctor steps into the hallway where Adrian stands, phone still in his hand, and says the words I would have given anything not to hear twice.

Adrian doesn't move for a long moment. Then he puts the phone back to his ear and says something to whoever is on the other end. He doesn't come into the room. He doesn't ask to see me. He turns and walks toward the elevator, and Ines is waiting for him there, already dressed, already smiling, and he doesn't even glance back at the door.

Nobody comes for my body that night.

*

The distance between the hospital and the Silver Moon compound means nothing to whatever I am now. One moment I'm standing in the corridor watching Adrian's back disappear into the elevator; the next I'm standing in the packhouse gardens, and three days have folded into a single blink.

The banners come first. White and silver, strung between the trees, the Silver Moon sigil — Adrian's sigil — stitched into every one of them. I drift through the crowd unseen, past werewolves in formal dress, past the long table set with food I once helped choose for another ceremony entirely, one that was supposed to be my own inheritance feast, not this.

Adrian stands at the front in Alpha silver, the council elders flanking him, all of them nodding along as he holds up a vial of clear liquid.

"The cure," he says, "for silver poisoning. My own work. Tested and proven."

It's my formula. My handwriting is still on the notes locked in that lab computer, notes I spent four years refining while he took credit for meetings he never attended. The elders don't know that. They clap. One of them shakes Adrian's hand and calls him the future of the pack.

Then Ines steps up beside him in white, and Adrian takes her wrist and turns it over in front of everyone, and sinks his teeth into her skin.

The crowd roars its approval. The mark blooms dark and permanent along Ines's wrist, and she looks up at Adrian like he's handed her the whole world, which, I suppose, he has.

I remember asking Adrian for that same mark on the morning of our own wedding, four years ago, and the careful way he deflected — not yet, he said, the council needs to see us stable first, marks are forever, let's not rush it. I believed him. I never once wondered why the reasons only applied to me.

A small hand tugs at Ines's dress. Micah, seven years old, in a little gray suit, looking up at her with an open, trusting face.

"Can I call you Mom now?" he asks. "For real, in front of everyone?"

Ines crouches down and pulls him into her arms, and over his shoulder, her eyes meet Adrian's, and something passes between them — relief, maybe, or triumph, the look of two people who have waited a long time for a lie to finally become official.

"Of course you can, baby," Ines says. "I've always been your mom. We just couldn't say it out loud before."

My chest — if I even still have one — feels like it's being torn down the middle.

Every night I rocked that boy through fevers. Every scraped knee, every nightmare, every science project finished at three in the morning. I carried him for nine months under a lie I never knew I was living, believed he was mine, only mine, the one real thing in that marriage.

He was never mine at all. He was theirs, from the very beginning, and I was the vessel they used to hide it.

I want to scream. No sound comes.

I want to grab Adrian by the throat and demand to know how long, how many years, how much of my life was spent building a throne for a man who let me die alone in a hospital room without even walking through the door. I reach for him and my hand passes through his shoulder like it's nothing, like I'm nothing, and he doesn't so much as shiver.

I gave him everything. My research. My body. My son who wasn't my son. My last four years spent in a lab breathing in chemical fumes so he could stand on a stage in silver robes and call himself an Alpha. And this is what it bought me — a locked hospital room, an unanswered phone, a body nobody claimed.

I'm not going to accept this. Whatever I am now, ghost or memory or nothing at all, I refuse to let this be the end of my story.

Movement catches my attention at the edge of the garden. A line of warriors in black uniform, unmarked by any pack crest I recognize, moving through the crowd like the celebration doesn't concern them at all. Nobody else seems to notice them. They walk straight toward the hospital wing, straight toward the room where my body still lies under a white sheet, and lift it between them without a word to anyone.

I try to follow. Try to look down at my own hands one more time, to understand what I even am anymore.

The gard

en goes black before I can find out who they are.