The Luna they buried

Chapter4

Chapter 4: Six Years Earlier

"Stop!"

The roar shattered the storm, and for a single heartbeat hope exploded inside me with such force that I couldn't breathe. The crowd gasped. The executioner froze. And Damon took a step toward me, rain streaming down his face, the cold certainty that had defined him throughout the trial entirely gone from his eyes.

What remained looked dangerously close to fear.

My heart lurched. Too late. The realization arrived with brutal, immediate clarity. Whatever he had finally understood had come too late, and the knowledge of it settled over me like the rain — cold, steady, and impossible to escape.

The mate bond pulsed again, hard and violent and agonized, as though it were tearing itself apart from the inside. I doubled over as pain exploded through my chest — not physical pain, but something deeper, something ancient and fundamental, a fracturing at the level of the soul. The bond was breaking. The crowd watched in stunned silence as Damon stumbled forward.

"Selena!"

The sound of my name on his lips nearly broke me. Not because it comforted me, but because I had wanted so desperately to hear it. I had begged for it across months of silence, cried for it through sleepless nights, prayed for it in the hours before my arrest. And now that he was finally saying my name with something raw and real behind it, it no longer mattered. A bitter laugh trembled through me at the particular cruelty of that timing.

"I said stop the execution!" His Alpha command cracked across the grounds and warriors instantly obeyed. The executioner stepped back. The council erupted into arguments. Everything became noise — meaningless noise — because the damage had already been done and I could feel it with terrible certainty. The mate bond wasn't merely weakening. It was dying. And once it snapped completely, I understood with bone-deep clarity that there would be no turning back.

Damon reached the platform and his hands closed around my shoulders. The touch sent a wave of memories crashing through me — stolen kisses beneath moonlit trees, laughter that had once felt like the safest sound in the world, promises made in the dark, dreams we had built together and then watched burn. Everything we had once been.

Everything we would never be again.

His grip tightened. "Look at me."

I didn't want to. Because if I looked into his eyes now, I might see regret, and regret was useless. Regret couldn't save me. Regret couldn't protect the child growing inside me. Regret couldn't erase what he had allowed to happen. But my gaze lifted anyway, as though something in me still couldn't refuse him, and the sight nearly shattered me. Damon looked horrified — truly, fully horrified — as though he had finally woken from a nightmare to find the damage already done around him.

"What happened?" he whispered.

For a moment I couldn't understand the question. Then I realized he wasn't asking about the trial, or the accusations, or the execution. He was asking about the bond. Because he had felt whatever was happening between us, and it had terrified him in a way that nothing else had managed to all morning.

A hysterical laugh threatened to escape me. Of course. The one thing capable of making Damon listen wasn't my words, or my tears, or my love. It was pain.

"Now you want answers?" I asked quietly.

His face tightened. The crowd, the rain, the council — all of it had disappeared from my awareness entirely. There was only this. Only us, reduced to the most essential version of what we had always been to each other.

Damon swallowed. When he spoke my name again, the tenderness in it almost hurt more than the betrayal. Almost. My hand drifted instinctively toward my stomach, that gesture of protection I couldn't seem to stop, and a shadow crossed his face as his eyes followed the movement. Understanding began to dawn — not complete understanding, but enough.

Enough to frighten him. Enough to make him realize there was something important he had never once considered. His gaze snapped back to mine, and the color drained from his face, and I knew exactly what question he was asking himself at last.

Too late. Again. Always, devastatingly too late.

The bond pulsed one final time. The force of it stole my breath entirely, and then a sharp c***k echoed through me — not a physical sound, but a spiritual one, a soul-deep fracture that my wolf screamed against as the agony ripped through me so violently that my knees gave out. Damon caught me before I reached the ground.

"Selena!" Panic filled his voice, real and undisguised, the kind I had once believed him incapable of. My vision blurred.

Darkness crept in from the edges. Something was pulling me away, gently but irresistibly, and the sensation terrified me even as it softened everything around it.

I clutched his shirt. For one brief, impossible moment the years between us dissolved — we weren't Alpha and condemned Luna, not judge and traitor, not enemies. We were simply two people who had loved each other. And somehow, in that final moment, that made everything worse.

His hand trembled against my face. "Stay with me." The plea sounded broken in a way I had never heard from him, and my throat tightened with everything I could no longer say. Why now? Why did he care now, when there was nothing left to save?

The darkness grew stronger. The world slipped further away. And then, quietly, a strange warmth began spreading through me — soft and gentle and achingly familiar, like standing beneath a silver sky during childhood, like being wrapped in something ancient that had always known my name. My wolf fell silent. The pain eased. The fear dissolved.

Voices echoed from somewhere very far away. Damon speaking urgently. The council shouting. The crowd in chaos. But each sound was further than the last, belonging to a world I was leaving behind, and then another voice emerged from somewhere deeper than sound — a woman's voice, soft as a whisper and powerful as thunder.

"Not yet."

My eyes widened. The voice came from inside my head, from a place no mortal voice had ever reached.

"Your story is not over."

Silver light exploded behind my closed eyelids. The execution grounds vanished. The rain vanished. Damon vanished.

The world dissolved entirely into light, and I floated in the weightless silence between one life and whatever came next as memories began flashing around me — my first shift, my first kiss, my wedding, Vivian's smile, the trial, the execution grounds, the child I had been carrying — faster and faster until they became a storm I cried out against.

The silver light surged.

"Open your eyes."

The command moved through every corner of my soul, and then the light burst apart and my eyes flew open and I bolted upright with a gasp that scraped the air from the room.

Sunlight streamed through a familiar bedroom window. Birds sang outside. A warm breeze moved through pale curtains.

For several seconds I could only stare, my chest heaving, my pulse thundering against my ribs. My hands trembled as I looked down at them. No blood. No injuries. No restraints. Nothing but a pale blue dress I hadn't worn in years, and a room arranged exactly as it had once been — the bookshelf, the fireplace, the vanity, the paintings, every piece of furniture sitting precisely where it had sat six years ago.

Slowly, terrified of what I would find, I looked at the calendar hanging beside the window.

My heart stopped. Then started again, hard enough to hurt.

The date wasn't yesterday. It wasn't last week or last year. It was six years in the past, and the room spun around me as the full weight of that impossibility settled over me like something physical.

A knock sounded at the door. I jumped. The handle turned, and a familiar voice drifted into the room — bright, cheerful, entirely trusting.

"Selena?"

My blood turned to ice.

The door opened, and Vivian stepped inside wearing the same smile she had worn before ruining my life. The same smile she had worn beside Damon on the day I died. My nails dug into my palms as I stared at her, because standing in front of me wasn't the Vivian from the execution grounds. This was the Vivian from six years ago — the woman I had still trusted, the woman who hadn't betrayed me yet.

Or had she already begun?

She tilted her head, concern flickering across her features. "Are you feeling alright?"

I stared at her. Then at the date. Then back at her.

And a terrifying realization settled over me with the quiet, irrevocable weight of something that could never be undone. I wasn't dead. I wasn't dreaming. I had been given another chance. But if I remembered my first life — every moment, every mistake, every face at my execution — then what was stopping someone else from remembering it too?.