Lahat ng Kabanata ng He Threw Me Away Once, This Time I Choose the Lycan prince: Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

FREYA'S POVLincoln Prep settled back into its usual rhythm within a day of term starting again, as though the beach house week had never happened at all — except nothing about me had gone back to the way it was before."You should stop doing that," Ivy said at lunch, watching me across the table with an expression I was starting to recognize as genuine bewilderment rather than performed concern. "That thing where someone says something awful and you just don't react.""What am I supposed to do? Cry on command?""I don't know. But just ignoring them doesn’t make it better for you. They’ll think you’re an easy target." She said lightly, like an observation about weather, though something sharper moved underneath it. "You could cry or shout, at least show you have emotions."It was strange to her because the version of me she'd built her whole strategy around — soft, bruised, grateful for scraps of kindness — had stopped showing up to be managed. I watched her try to find the seams of me

FREYA'S POVI woke up with a jolt, chest heaving, the sheets twisted damp around my legs like I'd been fighting something in my sleep that had actually managed to touch me.For a long, disorienting second, I didn't know where I was.The ceiling above me was too high, too clean, none of the water-stained plaster I'd been staring at in the hospital ward only moments ago. My hands came up on instinct, and they were small again, soft, unmarked by years of sedation and surrender. My own room. My own bed, in the house I'd been reborn into, moonlight coming through the window at an angle I recognized.I pressed a hand flat against my chest and tried to work out, with my heart still slamming, whether I'd simply dreamed of the hospital or whether I'd actually gone somewhere. Whether sleep had done something stranger than sleep was supposed to do, pulled me sideways through whatever thread connected this life to the one I'd already lost. It hadn't felt like a normal dream. Normal dreams didn't

FREYA'S POVThe first thing I noticed was the smell.Bleach. Sharp and clean, burning the back of my throat before I had even opened my eyes.For one terrifying second, I thought I was back in the ward.My whole body went stiff against the thin mattress. I could feel the sedation sitting heavy in my limbs, the sting of a needle in my arm and the gray light coming through a barred window and the small, swollen hands of a woman who had already given up. Somewhere in the back of my mind a television was still playing and a nurse was still slapping my face and I was still screaming for children nobody believed existed.I sat up way too fast. The room tilted."Easy. Easy." Someone said, the voice was close, calm. Nothing like those nurses.A hand pressed gently against my shoulder and eased me back down onto the pillow.The nurse was standing over me. She looked middle aged and her eyes were kind. Her sleeves shoved up to her elbows with a clipboard tucked under one arm.Recognition made m

FREYA'S POVThe grass went on forever.There was no path, no treeline, no horizon I could trust. Just an endless silver-green sea of it, waving slow under a sky the color of old pewter, and my feet pounding through it hard enough that my calves burned. I had been running for a long time. Long enough that my lungs had gone past hurting and into something quiet and numb.And still, when I looked up, the same flat stretch of field unspooled in front of me. The same.I ran faster. I pushed until the wind tore at my hair and my breath came in ragged pulls. The grass bent and parted and closed behind me. Nothing changed. Nothing ever changed.Then I heard them."Mama!"Two small voices, thin and frightened, coming from somewhere ahead of me and behind me at the same time."Mama, please! Help us!"Kai. Talia. My children.I pushed harder. The grass whipped my knees. Their voices grew louder, then fainter, then louder again, like they were running too, and we were both running and somehow nev

FREYA’S POVI made myself focus on my upcoming trip.My mother had arranged it for the end of the week — two days in Vermont, an appointment at a clinic tucked into the pines, an old specialist with an old family name. And I was torn straight down the middle about it. Half of me was mortified at the thought of sitting in a strange room and trying to explain, out loud, that I had already lived once and died once and remembered all of it. The other half of me was so eager it ached. The chance to finally see some real records and maybe find answers. Something in the world that might finally make sense of the thing I had become.I was so far inside my own head that I did not hear him come up beside me.“Well, which world have you disappeared to this time?”I startled, then sighed when I saw it was Ronan, and he was giving that slight boyish smile only I got."I’m still here." I tried to smile."Hmmm, yet, you’re here walking around with your face like you're reading a very serious letter