REBORN: THE BEAST LORDS' CONTRACT

CHAPTER 4 — What the Wolf Remembers

She made it exactly as far as the temple gardens before Kade caught up to her, moving with the silent, ground-eating stride of a man twice her size who had never once in his life needed to hurry to catch anything.

"Explain it," he said. Not a request.

Luna kept walking. "Which part."

"Any of it. All of it. 'I already died once.' What does that mean?"

She stopped by the fountain — the same fountain, she remembered with a jolt, where he had once told her, six years into their marriage, that he no longer trusted her enough to sleep in the same wing of the house. That memory belonged to a version of him who didn't exist yet, standing three feet away, jaw tight with something that looked almost like fear.

"It means," Luna said carefully, "that I know exactly how this marriage ends if nothing changes. I know which harvest fire you'll blame on me even though I was in a locked room with two witnesses when it started. I know which winter you'll stop speaking to me entirely. I know the exact night, ten years from now, that all five of you will stand in a room and decide I'm the reason the Pact is failing."

Kade's expression cracked, just slightly, at the harvest fire — a fire that hadn't happened yet, that existed nowhere except in a life he had no memory of living.

"That's not possible," he said, but his voice had lost its certainty.

"No," Luna agreed. "It isn't. And yet."

He stared at her for a long moment, gray eyes searching her face for the lie he clearly expected to find and couldn't. Behind him, she could see Ronan approaching across the garden, and beyond him, Sylas trailing with deliberate unhurried curiosity, and further still, Corvin watching from the shadow of a hedge like he already suspected she'd noticed him there.

"If you already know how it ends," Kade said slowly, "then you already know something else too. You know exactly which one of us it'll be. The one who finally — "

He didn't finish it. He didn't have to.

Luna held his gaze and said nothing, because the honest answer was a thing she wasn't ready to hand any of them yet — the answer that it hadn't been only one of them, in the end. It had been all five, in five different ways, across ten slow years, and the final blow had simply been the last domino in a line they'd all helped push.

"Seven days," she said instead. "Starting in six. I'd start deciding now, Lord Thorne, whether you intend to be a different man on that journey than the one I apparently already buried."

She left him standing by the fountain with that, and did not need to look back to know, from the sudden stillness of the garden behind her, that for the first time in either of her two lives, Kade Thorne had absolutely no idea what to do with her — and that somewhere in that uncertainty, something that wasn't quite fear had started, quietly, to take root.