Chapter 3

SIMONE

I gasped awake, sitting bolt upright in bed, my chest heaving like I'd just run for my life. Sweat clung to my skin.

My heart slammed against my ribs so hard it hurt, and for one disorienting second, I braced for the pain, the claws, the blood, the shattered glass ceiling above me.

None of it came. Just soft morning light and the smell of clean sheets.

I sat there a long moment, waiting for my body to catch up to the fact that it wasn't dying. My hands were shaking.

I pressed one flat against my ribs, half expecting to feel the wound still there, and felt nothing but skin, whole and unbroken.

It didn't make sense. None of it made sense, the softness of the sheets, the birdsong outside, the fact that I was breathing at all.

The door flung open before I could get any further than that.

"You're finally up." Rose swept in, already reaching for the curtains. "Better hurry, your father's expecting you down for breakfast, and you know how he gets when the meat goes cold."

*Father.*

The word landed strangely, like a puzzle piece forced into the wrong slot.

I hadn't heard anyone call him that and meant Alpha Kyle in five years, not since he passed, back when I was still Leo's Luna and too broken to properly grieve him.

Except he hadn't passed. Not here. Not yet.

The memory hit in a single violent wave. Olivia's claws. The paper crushed in my fist. Leo's voice telling me I was nothing but a means to a throne. The warmth of my own blood pooling beneath me on the glasshouse floor.

I'd died. I was certain of it, could still feel the ghost of that pain lodged somewhere behind my ribs, dull now but unmistakably real, like a scar on a body that had never technically owned the wound.

"Simone? You've gone pale." Rose's voice cut through, laced with concern.

I didn't trust myself to answer. I threw the blanket off and walked, too fast, toward the bathroom, my bare feet slapping against cold marble.

I gripped the edges of the sink and forced myself to look up.

The face staring back wasn't the one I remembered dying with.

I was younger. Slimmer. Untouched by five years of marriage to a man who'd apparently spent every one of those years hating what I looked like in private while smiling at me in public.

My hands trembled as I touched my own cheek, half expecting the reflection to shatter the way the glasshouse had.

I stood there long enough for the shaking to slow, long enough to let the grief catch up with the shock.

Grief for a mother I now might get to keep, grief for five years I'd wasted loving a man who'd never once loved me back, grief for the girl in this mirror who still believed her life was about to begin instead of end.

I let myself feel all of it, just for a moment, before I made myself breathe.

Still unsteady, I grabbed my phone off the counter and checked the date, my stomach twisting tighter with every second the screen took to load.

Five years. I'd gone back five whole years, to the exact morning of the day I'd first meet Leo at my father's table, twelve days before the bonding ceremony that would set every single thing that destroyed me back into motion.

The realization dropped through me like a stone, and then, slowly, something else settled in its place. I had died.

And somehow, impossibly, I'd been given this back, a second chance, wound backward to the one morning where everything could still go differently.

Where my mother was still alive to see it.

I stared into the mirror, and slowly, a grin spread across my face, sharp, unfamiliar, nothing like the naive girl who used to live behind these eyes.

I splashed cold water on my skin, and it still felt achingly smooth, achingly alive.

I was back. And this time, I refused to let Olivia or Leo crown themselves over my broken body.

Not while I still had breath left to fight with not even if it cost me every last drop of it twice.

"Dad, sorry I'm late." I slid into my seat at the long table, forcing my voice into something calm, something that didn't betray the storm raging beneath my skin.

And there she was.

My mother sat at the far end, pouring tea with the same steady hands I hadn't seen move in five years, her hair still dark, her laugh still easy, still hearable.

My throat closed so fast I had to look down at my plate to keep from giving myself away.

I hadn't let myself hope I'd want to dine with her again, not really, not until this exact second.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," she said, amused, sliding a cup toward me. "Rough night?"

"Something like that," I managed.

My younger sister, Flora, sat beside me, already halfway through an argument with our father about whether she was old enough to attend the bonding ceremony unescorted, a fight I remembered losing interest in the first time around, back when I was too busy dreaming about wedding dresses to notice anyone else at the table.

"You haven't forgotten about today, I hope," my father said, setting down his fork. "Leo's coming. Alpha of the André pack. It's time the two packs talked seriously about an alliance."

The memory of this exact conversation slammed into me, how eagerly I'd smiled the first time, how blindly I'd agreed without a single question, how thoroughly I'd handed my future to a man who was already planning my downfall before I'd even said the word *bonded.*

This time, my smile came slower. Colder. Calculated.

"Of course I remember," I said, and agreed to the meeting exactly as I had before, because changing everything all at once would only raise questions I wasn't ready to answer.

Not yet. Let them believe I was still the same girl. Let Leo believe it most of all.

I rose from the table and drifted toward the window, my pulse picking up before I even reached it. And there it was.

The glasshouse.

The same one Leo would build with his own hands and gift me in another life, except this time it was only scaffolding, wrapped around an empty frame like a skeleton not yet given skin, set deliberately on the disputed land between our two packs.

Land neither pack could touch without the other's blessing. Land that would only ever belong to whoever sat on both thrones at once.

He'd chosen that ground on purpose. Not out of love, out of strategy.

Build the marriage there, and the land stopped being disputed. It became his the moment I did.

My hands curled into fists at my sides as I stared out at the half-built glass walls glinting under the morning sun, memory and fury tangling together until I could barely tell which feeling belonged to which lifetime.

I wouldn't be the fool twice. Whatever game Leo thought he was playing, whatever Olivia believed she'd already won, neither of them had the faintest idea what kind of Luna they'd be facing this time around.

"Simone." Flora's voice broke through my thoughts, quiet and hesitant, the way it always was right before bad news. "Leo's here."

My whole body went rigid.

I turned from the window slowly, my heart hammering a warning against my ribs, and found my mother's eyes on me from across the room, soft, questioning, like she already sensed something in me had changed overnight and hadn't decided yet whether to ask.

I forced my expression into something soft, something unsuspecting the same mask I'd worn for five years without ever realizing it was a mask at all.

Let the games begin.