All Chapters of I Died Loving You, I Woke Up Hating You : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Sandra’s POVI didn’t answer right away.I just sat there on the edge of the mattress with my hand still pressed flat against my ribs and my heart doing something violent inside my chest. Three knocks. That pause. That voice.Dara.It couldn’t be Dara. Dara had gotten sick when I was twenty two — something that moved fast and didn’t respond to anything the pack healers tried. I’d sat with her through most of it. Held her hand at the end. Watched her go in a way that was somehow quieter and more devastating than my own death had been, which felt appropriate because that was always how it was with Dara. She made everything feel more real than it actually was.She died two years before I did.So the voice on the other side of that door was not Dara’s voice.Except it was.“Sandra.” Again. A little louder this time, with that specific texture she had when she was trying not to sound worried and failing. “I can hear you moving around. Are you sick?”I stood up. Sat back down. Stood up agai

Sandra’s POVHe didn’t follow me back inside.I sat on that bench for another ten minutes after he left, hands folded in my lap, watching the tree line like it owed me something. My heart was doing that thing again — that slow unsteady thing I had no patience for — and I waited until it stopped before I moved.The expression on his face when I’d said should there be kept coming back to me. I’d catalogued every version of Zadok’s face over six years and that particular one didn’t exist anywhere in my inventory. It wasn’t confusion exactly. It wasn’t irritation. It was something closer to — recalibration. Like I’d said something that didn’t fit the model he was working from and he was quietly adjusting.Good. Let him adjust.I went back inside and spent the rest of the morning doing what eighteen year old Sandra would do — helped Dara with the linen inventory, stayed out of my father’s way, kept my head down and my mouth useful. I was good at invisible. I’d been practicing it my whole l

Sandra’s POVI turned around slowly.Not quickly — quickly would’ve looked guilty and I had nothing to be guilty about. I was standing in a corridor. People stood in corridors. I turned at a pace that said I heard my name and responded to it, nothing more.Zadok was maybe six feet away. Close enough that I could see the slight tension around his eyes that meant he was working something out and hadn’t finished yet. He was still in his training clothes — dark, fitted, the kind of effortless that probably wasn’t effortless at all — and he was looking at me with that expression I still didn’t have a name for.Behind me the door was still slightly open. I didn’t look back at it.“You’re not training,” he said.“I finished early.”“I watched you leave mid-session.”So he’d been at the grounds. I hadn’t seen him and I’d been watching the whole time, which meant he’d arrived after I’d left, or he’d been somewhere I hadn’t thought to look. Both options were annoying in different ways.“I neede

Sandra’s POVI read it a third time.You were never safe.The handwriting was neat. Controlled. The kind you develop when you’ve been taught to write properly rather than the kind that just happens naturally. No signature. No indication of who’d sent it or why or what exactly it was supposed to mean.I folded it back along its crease and stood in my doorway and looked at the empty corridor where the man had been and thought about what kind of person sends a warning through someone else’s hands. Someone who wanted distance between themselves and the message. Someone who needed me to know something without being able to be connected to the knowing.Someone who was afraid.I went back inside and sat at my desk and put the note flat in front of me and the wolfbane casing beside it and looked at both of them together.In the first life I’d died believing the dagger was about Zadok. Someone wanted him dead, I’d gotten in the way, simple brutal arithmetic. I’d spent my last conscious minutes

Sandra’s POVI stood in that records room for a long time.Long enough for the light through the small window to shift. Long enough for my legs to remind me I’d been standing in the same position without moving. I read the signature three more times and it stayed the same every time which meant I wasn’t misreading it and I wasn’t misunderstanding it and the thing I was looking at was simply true.Vanessa’s mother had signed a contract that included my name before I was born.I folded the document and put it back where I’d found it. Not because I was done with it — because taking it meant someone would notice it was gone and I wasn’t ready for anyone to know I’d been in here. I memorized the shelf, the position, the two records it was filed between. I could find it again in the dark if I needed to.Then I left and walked upstairs and sat on my bed and thought.The agreement was territorial. That much was clear from the language around my name — the clause referenced land rights, pack b