I Died at My Mate's Command

Three Years Too Early

Bria was still smiling at me from the doorway, and I wanted to be sick.

She was alive. That was the thing I couldn't get my mind around, the thing that kept catching in my throat. Three years from now, or three years ago, I honestly no longer knew how to say it, Bria would die in the fire that swallowed this whole house, and I would be the one who found her body in the ash. Yet here she stood, holding a breakfast tray and grumbling about the kitchen. "My lady?" Her smile slipped sideways. "You've gone white as milk. Are you ill?"

"What's the date," I said.

"The what?"

"The date, Bria. Tell me what day it is."

She set the tray down slowly. "It's the fourteenth," she said, watching me. "The fourteenth of the Greening Moon. My lady, you know what day it is. You've been counting down to the King's arrival for a whole week."

The fourteenth of the Greening Moon.

I did the math before I could stop myself, because I always did math without meaning to. Numbers and dates and faces stuck to the inside of my skull whether I wanted them there or not. My whole life people had called it a gift, this near-perfect memory of mine, and I had never once thought of it that way. It only ever meant that I forgot nothing, including every single thing I would have given anything to forget.

The fourteenth of the Greening Moon. Three months before the ceremony. Three years and three months before a silver blade went through my throat.

"I need you to do something for me," I said, "and I need you not to ask me why."

"Of course, my lady."

"My father is going to send for me, before I've even had a chance to eat. Any moment now." I held her eyes. "And he's going to tell me my name has been entered into the Alpha Selection."

Bria let out a nervous little laugh. "My lady, no one's even been told yet who's been chosen for—"

A fist hammered hard against the door.

Bria jumped half out of her skin. I didn't move at all. A footman's voice came through the wood, breathless and urgent. "Lady Selena. Lord Ashwood requests your presence in his study. At once."

Bria stared at the door, then turned and stared at me, and the color drained out of her face exactly the way it had just drained out of mine.

"How did you—"

"Help me dress," I said. "The gray gown. Quickly now."

My father's study smelled of old paper and pipe smoke, exactly the way it always had. He was standing at the window with his hands folded behind his back, and he did not bother to turn around when I came in.

"There she is," he said warmly. "My beautiful daughter. Sit down."

I did not sit.

In my old life I would have sat. I would have folded my hands neatly in my lap and waited quietly for him to tell me what I was good for. I had spent nineteen years inside this house learning to make myself useful, learning that love in the Ashwood family was a thing you had to earn by being convenient, and I had been so very good at it. So good, and so hungry for a single kind word, that I never once stopped to ask why his kindness only ever arrived after I'd done something he wanted done.

"I have wonderful news," he said, finally turning to face me, smiling. My father had always had a wonderful smile, and once upon a time I had lived for it. "The Selection committee has confirmed your name. You'll be presented to Alpha King Kael Blackthorne as a Luna candidate, one of only a handful of girls in all five kingdoms." He spread his hands wide, as though he were offering me the moon itself. "Do you understand what this means for us?"

"I understand exactly what it means," I said.

"A Blackthorn match." He came around the desk toward me. "An Ashwood seated as Luna of the most powerful pack in the world. Daughter, this is everything we've worked for. This is the family climbing back to where it belongs."

"And if I don't want it?"

He stopped walking.

For just a heartbeat his smile flickered, in exactly the same way Kael's eyes had flickered on the execution platform, and beneath it I finally saw the thing I had never once let myself see while I was alive. There was nothing behind that smile at all. Nothing in it for me. Only a man looking at one of his assets and deciding it had finally come good.

"Don't be foolish," he said, smooth again in an instant. "Every girl in five kingdoms would kill for a chance like this."

Funny, I thought. Last time around, it was the other way about.

"I'm asking you honestly, Father." I kept my voice perfectly flat. "If I asked you to withdraw my name. If I told you I didn't want to stand in front of that man and be looked over like a horse. Would you do it?"

"No." He didn't even pause to think. "No, of course I wouldn't. The arrangement is already made, and the King arrives today." He turned back toward the window, finished with me. "Wear something that brings out the silver in your eyes. He'll like that."

He'll like that.

I almost laughed. I almost stood there in the middle of my father's study and laughed until I wept, because I knew precisely what Kael Blackthorne would one day do with the silver in my eyes. He would point at it in front of ten thousand people and call it the mark of a monster, and my father would be somewhere in that very crowd, and he would not say one single word to stop it. I knew, because that was exactly how it had happened the first time.

"Yes, Father," I said instead.

That was another thing I had learned in my old life. You don't argue with a wall. You simply find a way to walk around it.

I didn't go back to my room afterward. Instead I went down to the old chapel at the far end of the east hall, the one nobody ever used, and I shut the heavy door behind me and stood there in the dark and let myself shake for exactly one minute and then I made myself stop.

I knew that I was alive when I had every right to be dead. I knew I had three months before the ceremony where everything first began to fall apart, and three years before the platform took everything else. I knew every name, every face, every lie that was coming and who would betray me in the end, even if I did not yet understand why any of them had done it.

And I knew one more thing, that the bond was still there.

I could feel it right then, low and steady in my chest, a soft constant pull toward the gates, toward the road beyond them, toward a man somewhere out there in a black coat who did not yet know my name and would one day order my death regardless. The bond did not care in the slightest that he had killed me. The bond was an i***t. It had been dragging me toward Kael Blackthorne since the very first moment I laid eyes on him, and apparently dying had not been enough to shut the wretched thing off.

"Listen to me," I said out loud, to my own chest, to the stupid faithful thing beating away in there. "I don't care what you want. I am never, ever doing that again."

I pressed my hand flat over the spot where the pull lived, as if I could hold it down.

"Two things," I whispered into the dark. "I am going to prove that the prophecy is a lie. I don't yet know who wrote it, or why, but it murdered me, and I am going to tear it apart with my own two hands." My voice didn't shake, and I was almost proud of that. "And I am never going to love Kael Blackthorne again. He can walk in through those gates and look at me with those eyes. He can call me beautiful. He can do every last thing he did the first time that made me fall so hard. I don't care anymore."

The pull tugged back, soft and warm, as though it hadn't heard a single word I'd said.

"I mean it," I told it. "He is not my mate. He is the man who is going to kill me. And this time, I'll be ready for him."

For a long moment the chapel stayed quiet around me.

Then, far off beyond the walls, a horn blew. Not one horn but a whole row of them, sounding one after another, the long deep call of an Alpha's caravan announcing itself at the gate. The sound rolled across the courtyard and through the old stone and right into my chest, and the bond lit up inside me like someone had struck a match against my ribs.

He wasn't supposed to arrive until nightfall. That was what Bria had said. That was what I remembered. Yet here he was already, hours early.

I stood frozen in the dark chapel with my hand pressed over my heart, and one cold thought cut clean through everything else.

The timeline is already changing. And I have no idea at all what comes next.

I heard running feet out in the hall, and a maid's voice, shrill with panic, calling my name. "Lady Selena! Lady Selena, where are you? The King's at the gate, your father wants you in the great hall, now—"

I opened the chapel door.

Down the length of the long stone corridor, the doors of the great hall stood thrown open, spilling torchlight across the floor, and the whole household was pouring toward them. Under all the noise, under the shouting and the hurrying footsteps, I heard it for the first time in three years.

His voice, very calm. Giving some quiet order to a man out in the courtyard, in the very same flat tone that had once said kill the traitor over the sound of my blood hitting the boards.

My feet started carrying me toward it before my head had agreed to anything.