REBORN: THE BEAST LORDS' CONTRACT

CHAPTER 1 — The Wedding That Never Was

Luna woke up in a body that hadn't been stabbed.

For three full seconds, she lay perfectly still in a bed she recognized with a horror that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with memory, and catalogued the impossible: her hands, unscarred. Her ribs, unbroken. Sunlight — real sunlight, warm and ordinary — falling across sheets embroidered with the Ellery sigil, the sigil of a house she had left behind the day she married into five others.

The wedding sigil.

Today is my wedding day.

She sat up so fast her head spun, and the room spun with it — not the death chamber, not the cold floor, not Draven's claws — a girlhood bedroom she hadn't slept in for ten years, the morning light of a day she had lived through exactly once before and never expected to see again.

"You're up early," said a voice from the doorway, and Luna turned to find her old handmaid, Iris, dead now for six years in the life she remembered, very much alive and holding a wedding gown Luna recognized down to the last pearl button. "The Beast Lords' envoys arrived at dawn. All five of them insisted on riding ahead of the wedding party themselves. Rather dramatic, if you ask me."

Luna's pulse did something complicated. Not five separate ceremonies over five separate months, the way it had happened — the way she remembered it happening. All five, today, at once.

She had years. She had, apparently, been given the entire beginning back.

Don't waste it the way you wasted the last hundred.

She dressed in a haze of calculation so total it frightened her more than the dying had. By the time Iris laced the final ribbon, Luna had already decided one thing with absolute clarity: she was not walking down that aisle to say the same vows that had gotten her killed.

The temple was exactly as she remembered — white stone, black banners for five Houses, a crowd of nobles who would, within a decade, watch her die and call it a tragic accident of the Pact. And there, at the altar, standing in a line like five different verses of the same terrible poem, were her husbands.

Kade Thorne stood tallest, arms crossed, gray eyes already fixed on her with the possessive intensity she now recognized as the first thread of a noose. Ronan Ashgrave, broad as a doorway, watching her with an unreadable gentleness that had once fooled her into thinking gentle meant safe. Sylas Vane wore his court smile like armor. Corvin Blackmoor stood half a step back from the others, always watching the room instead of her — already the spy, already calculating. And Draven Ossian, barely into his twenties in this timeline, radiated a restless, coiled energy that she remembered ending, ten years from now, with his claws in her chest.

She had married these men. She had loved pieces of at least three of them. They had killed her anyway.

The priest lifted the ceremonial cord meant to bind all five contracts at once, and Luna, for the first time in either of her lives, spoke before anyone gave her permission to.

"Wait."

The word landed like a struck bell. Five hundred nobles went silent. Five husbands turned to look at her as one — really look, for the first time, the way they hadn't in ten years of marriage the first time around.

"I won't take these vows," Luna said, "not as written. I have a different contract to offer. And I think, gentlemen, you're going to want to hear it before the Pilgrimage announcement the King is about to make."

Kade's eyes narrowed. Somewhere in the crowd, a woman gasped — because no one, in the history of the Beast Lords' Pact, had ever refused it at the altar.

Luna smiled, and for the first time since she'd woken up alive, it didn't feel like a mask.

This time, she thought, I choose how the story ends.