The Luna Who Died Twice

"Don't you dare close your eyes on me." Kayla's vision blurred red at the edges. Rain hammered the windshield, but she barely felt it, barely felt anything except the cold spreading through her chest where the metal had folded inward, pinning her in place like a hand pressing down on her ribs. A stranger's voice, rough and desperate, hands pressed hard against a wound she couldn't see but could feel pulling the warmth out of her one second at a time. "Stay with me," he said, and his voice cracked on the last word. "Stay with me, please, I can't lose you, not like this, not on the side of some road." She didn't know this man. She didn't know this road, this rain, this car crumpled around her like a fist closing. The last thing she remembered clearly was leaving her apartment for a job interview, her coffee still warm in the cup holder, her playlist humming through the speakers, her biggest worry being whether she'd remembered to grab her resume off the printer. Now there was only pain, and a stranger's voice breaking apart above her, and the terrifying certainty that whatever was happening to her body could not be undone. "I can't," she whispered, the words scraping her throat raw. "I can't stay." "You can. You have to. Do you hear me? You have to." Her eyes slid shut anyway. Not because she wanted to. Because her body simply stopped listening to her, stopped fighting, gave itself over to the dark the way exhausted things do when there's nothing left to hold onto. The last thing she felt was his hand tightening around hers, and then the world went quiet, then dark, then nothing at all. She woke up screaming. Not in a hospital bed. Not in an ambulance, surrounded by the sterile beeping of machines that should have been keeping her alive. She woke up in a forest, cold moss soaking through her clothes, moonlight slicing down through black branches overhead like something out of a dream she hadn't asked to have. Her chest didn't hurt anymore. Nothing hurt. Her heart slammed against her ribs like it was trying to prove to her, and to itself, that it still knew how. A man knelt over her, and for one disorienting second she thought it was the stranger from the crash, the one who'd begged her to stay. Same broad shoulders. Same desperate hands hovering like he was afraid to touch her and afraid not to. But his eyes were gold, not brown, and they were staring at her like she was something that shouldn't exist. Like she was a ghost that had wandered into the wrong story. "You're not supposed to be alive," he said, and his voice shook. Kayla scrambled back, palms digging into wet earth, her whole body trembling with a fear she couldn't name. "Get away from me." "Kayla." Her name in his mouth sounded like a wound reopening, like he'd said it a thousand times in the dark when no one was there to hear him. "Kayla, look at me." "How do you know my name?" He froze. Something shattered behind his expression, so fast she almost missed it, grief and disbelief colliding in his eyes all at once. "You don't remember me." "I don't know you." Her voice cracked, and hot tears blurred her vision even though she didn't understand why she was crying, only that something in her chest had cracked open and she couldn't close it back up. "I don't know where I am. I was in a car. There was an accident, there was a man, he was trying to save me, and now I'm here, and you're looking at me like I'm supposed to know you, and I don't. I don't know anything. I don't know anything and it's terrifying." "Five years." He said it like the words cost him something, like every syllable was dragged up from somewhere deep and painful. "You've been gone five years." "That's not possible." "I watched you die." His jaw tightened, gold eyes glassy in the moonlight, and for a moment he looked less like a stranger and more like a man standing at the edge of a grief he'd never let himself finish. "I held you while you died. I buried you. I have visited a headstone with your name on it every week for five years, and now you're lying in the same clearing where I lost you, breathing, with her heartbeat." "Whose heartbeat?" He didn't answer. He didn't have to. The way he looked at her, like she was something sacred and terrifying at once, told her enough, and the silence between them felt heavier than anything he could have said. "My name is Chase," he finally said, voice low, careful, like he was approaching something wounded. "And five years ago, I lost my mate in this exact spot. I have spent every single day since then trying to understand why. And now you're here, and I don't know if I'm losing my mind or if some part of me finally got the one thing I never stopped praying for." Kayla shook her head, backing further away until her shoulders hit the rough bark of a tree, the pain of it grounding her in a way nothing else had since she'd woken up. "I'm not your mate. I'm not anyone's anything. I have a life. I have a job interview I'm late for, I have a mother who's going to be worried sick, I have—" She stopped. Because she didn't have any of those things anymore, did she. Not if five years had passed. Not if the world had moved on without her while she'd been wherever the dark had taken her, living lives and having birthdays and grieving her without her ever knowing. "What happened to me?" she whispered, and the question felt like it might break her in half. Chase's hands curled into fists at his sides, like he was holding himself back from reaching for her, from pulling her into arms that clearly remembered exactly how she used to fit against him. "You were murdered." The word landed like a slap, and Kayla felt her whole body go cold in a way that had nothing to do with the rain-soaked ground beneath her. "By who?" "I don't know." His voice roughened, and for the first time she saw real anguish crack through the composed grief he'd been wearing like armor. "I've spent five years trying to find out, and I don't know. I've turned this pack inside out looking for an answer, and every trail went cold, and I had to live with that. I had to live with loving you and never knowing who took you from me." Somewhere in the trees behind him, a branch snapped, sharp and sudden in the quiet. Chase's head whipped around, his entire body angling instantly between Kayla and the sound, every line of him shifting into something coiled and dangerous, a predator's stillness settling over him like a second skin. "Stay behind me," he said, and there was nothing soft left in his voice. "Why? What's out there?" "Wolves," he said, and the word came out flat, warning, final. "Mine. And they're not going to believe you're really her. Not without proof. Not without a fight." A figure stepped out of the treeline, broad, sharp-eyed, moving with the kind of controlled menace that made Kayla's stomach drop even though she didn't know him, even though every rational part of her mind said she had no reason to be afraid of a man she'd never met. "Chase." The man's gaze flicked to Kayla and something ugly moved behind his eyes, gone so fast she almost doubted she'd seen it at all. "Is that—" "It's her." Chase didn't look away from Kayla, his voice fierce with a certainty that startled even him. "It's Kayla." "That's not possible." The stranger's voice hardened, and Kayla heard something underneath the disbelief, something that sounded almost like fear. "She's dead. I watched her die too, remember, Brody? We buried her together. We stood at that grave together." Kayla's skin prickled. Brody. The name settled somewhere in her chest like a stone dropped into still water, and for one disorienting heartbeat, something that wasn't quite memory flickered behind her eyes. A voice she almost recognized, warm once, then cold. A hand she almost remembered flinching away from. Gone before she could hold onto it. She blinked, and it was gone. "I don't know what you people think is happening," she said, forcing steel into her voice even though her hands were shaking so badly she had to press them flat against her thighs to hide it, "but I need someone to tell me where I am, and I need it now, because I am one more strange thing away from completely falling apart." Brody's eyes narrowed on her, calculating in a way that made the hair on her arms stand up, like he was measuring her for something she couldn't see. "She doesn't even sound like her." "She doesn't remember," Chase said. "Convenient." "Watch it." The warning in Chase's voice was low, lethal, a sound that made even Brody go still for a moment. Kayla looked between them, the tension crackling like exposed wire, and felt something close to panic clawing up her throat. Whatever had happened to her, whatever this place was, she'd landed in the middle of something that had been simmering long before she opened her eyes in this clearing, something old and ugly that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the woman whose body she was apparently wearing. "I want to go home," she said, and hated how small her voice sounded, how much it betrayed the fear she'd been trying to bury under anger. Chase turned back to her, and for a moment the fury in his expression softened into something almost unbearably gentle, something that made her chest ache even though she didn't understand why. "You are home. You just don't know it yet." "I don't believe you." "I know." He held out a hand, careful, like she might bolt at the slightest wrong move. "But you're going to have to trust me anyway. Because whoever killed you the first time is still out there. And now that you're breathing again, they're going to want to finish what they started." Behind him, Brody's face went carefully blank, but not before Kayla caught the flash of something sharp and furious in his eyes, something that looked almost like grief wearing the mask of contempt. She didn't take Chase's hand. Not yet. But she didn't run either. Because somewhere underneath the fear, underneath the confusion, underneath five years of missing time she couldn't explain, something inside her chest recognized the danger standing three feet away wearing Brody's face. And it terrified her more than dying ever had.