The Alpha's Regret Came Too Late for His Dead Luna

Chapter Two: The Bride Who Remembered

Everyone kept telling me how happy I looked. That was the first thing I learned about coming back from the dead. No one can tell the difference between a woman in love and a woman with a plan.

"Look at her glow," my aunt said in the carriage, dabbing at her eyes. "I have never seen a bride so calm."

Calm. Yes. I had been a wreck the first time, a trembling nineteen-year-old so desperate to be chosen that I had wept with gratitude at my own wedding, wept because a real alpha had looked at a border healer's daughter and called her worthy. This time I sat with my spine straight and my hands still in my lap and catalogued the day like a battlefield, because I had walked this exact ground once already, and I knew where every mine was buried.

I knew, for instance, that Torvald would be twenty minutes late to his own wedding, and would blame a border patrol, and that the border had been quiet that whole week because I had treated three of those patrol wolves myself and heard them complain of boredom over their bandages. He was late because he was with Sable. He had been with Sable that morning three years ago too. I simply had not known it, and had spent the twenty minutes apologizing to our guests for a groom who could not be bothered to arrive on time to claim me.

I did not apologize for him this time.

When he swept in with his lie already assembled on his handsome face, I met him at the altar with a serene smile and said, loud enough for the front rows to hear, "The border, was it? How strange. I dressed Bram's shoulder only yesterday, and he swore the eastern line had not seen so much as a rabbit all week. You must have had a very quiet patrol, husband."

Torvald's easy smile hitched. Just for a moment. Just long enough for the front rows to notice that the bride had caught the groom in something on the altar steps, and to lean toward one another and murmur.

"You keep sharp ears, little healer," he said, recovering, covering it with a laugh that did not reach his eyes.

"I keep sharp everything now," I said sweetly, and let him wonder what I meant.

We were bonded under the full moon. I will not tell you I felt nothing, because that would be a lie, and I have decided that in this second life I will at least be honest with myself. The bond is the bond. When he spoke the mating vow, something in my chest lit up the way it had the first time, warm and desperate and glad, some animal part of me that did not care what he was, only that he was mine. I let it show. I even let my eyes shine, because a woman who is visibly in love is a woman no one watches too closely, and I had a great deal of work to do that no one could be allowed to watch.

But underneath the glow, in the cold clear room at the back of my mind where the dying woman lived now, I made my first correction to history.

The first time, on my wedding night, Sable had been introduced to me as Torvald's cousin, newly arrived, in need of a place in the pack. I had welcomed her. I had given her a room near mine. I had, moon help me, been kind to her, and she had spent three years turning that kindness into the knife that opened my belly.

This time, when the tall woman in the green dress came gliding through the wedding crowd with her sugar smile and her hand already extended and the introduction already shaped on her lips, I was ready for her.

"Luna Renna," she purred, her voice smooth as poured cream. "I am Sable. Torvald's cousin. I do hope we shall be the dearest of..."

"You're not his cousin," I said.

The crowd around us did not still, not yet, but the few closest went quiet, and Sable's outstretched hand hung in the air between us like something forgotten.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said you are not his cousin." I kept my voice pleasant and pitched it to carry a little further than it needed to. "Ironmoon keeps a blood-ledger going back nine generations. I have read it, cover to cover, because a Luna should know her pack down to its roots." I had not read it the first time. I had read it in the three years since, dying and afterward, searching for the truth of the woman who killed me, and I had found exactly one thing, and I laid it down now like a winning card turned face up on a table. "There is no Sable in it. There is no cousin of the Alpha's line unaccounted for in forty years. So before I give you a room in my packhouse, cousin, I would love for you to tell all these good people who you actually are."

The nearest guests had gone silent now in truth, and their silence was spreading outward through the crowd like a ripple on a pond, and I watched Sable feel it reach her, and watched the clever calculation move behind her lovely eyes.

"Who I am," Sable said at last, recovering her smile like a dropped scarf, "is a woman who came a long way to be family, and finds the welcome colder than the border. But no matter." She lowered her unshaken hand. "Weddings are trying. We will get to know one another properly, Luna, in the days to come. I am sure of it."

"Oh, I am counting on it," I said, and meant every letter of it, and watched her hear the second meaning under the first and not quite be able to name it.

She had walked into my life unopposed and unsuspected the first time. She would not do it again. And whatever else this second life cost me, I had already changed one thing that the first Renna, sweet and blind and grateful, had let stand: the witch now knew she was seen. It is a small thing, being seen. But a hunter who knows the deer has spotted her must move faster, and clumsier, and I had three years to make her clumsy.