The Rouges Moon

Chapter 1

I am begging a man who used to whisper my name like a prayer, and he won't even look at me while he decides to kill me.

"Please don't do this."

My voice is already breaking, and I hate that, I hate that even now, with his guards' hands crushing bruises into my arms, some small i***t part of me is still trying to sound like the composed, gracious Luna he fell for instead of the terrified girl I actually am. I thrash against their grip and get nothing for it but pain. "Rhys. Look at me. I am your Luna."

He doesn't turn around.

He's standing at the window with his back to the room, moonlight silvering down the line of his shoulders, and I remember stupidly, uselessly, in the middle of the worst night of my life how those same shoulders felt under my hands on our bonding night, how certain I'd been that I would spend the rest of my life safe inside the reach of them.

"Rhys, please." My voice finally does give out, cracking into something raw and horrible. "It's our baby."

"Is it?" His voice is flat. Distant. The voice of a stranger wearing my mate's face. "Marisol showed me the blood-binding. The pup isn't mine, Wren. It never was."

"That's a lie. Whatever she showed you, it's a lie "

"Take it out of her." He says it to the room, not to me, like I've already stopped being a person he's willing to address directly.

"Then get rid of her. Quietly. She's not this pack's problem after tonight."

Somewhere behind me, Doctor Aldric makes a small, strangled sound of protest, and gets silenced by a single look from the guard captain.

Nobody in this room is going to say no to an Alpha's direct order. I already know that. I knew it the moment they dragged me in here.

"Rhys." I'm not proud of the sound that comes out of me something closer to an animal's scream than a woman's voice. "I love you. I have never once Rhys, look at me, look at me "

He finally does.

I spend the rest of my life however short it's about to be grateful and devastated in equal measure that he does, because I need to see it, whatever's about to happen to me. I need to know exactly what his face looks like when he decides I'm disposable.

There's nothing in his eyes. Not fury, not grief, not even the cold satisfaction of a man exacting justice on a woman who wronged him. Just a terrible, hollow blankness, like something's already been carved out of him and I'm not important enough to have noticed when.

"I loved you," he says, very quietly, and for one destroyed heartbeat I think I actually let myself think that this is the moment he stops it, that this is the moment sanity or memory or anything real between us wins out over whatever poison Marisol's put in his ear.

"Once," he finishes. "That's over now."

He turns back to the window.

"Yes, Alpha," says the guard at my side, and after that there isn't room in me for words anymore, only pain, and the doctor's shaking hands, and the specific unbearable moment when everything I've been carrying for seven months simply stops.

I don't remember them finishing. I don't remember the walk to the river, though I know, distantly, floating somewhere just outside my own body, that it happens that I'm carried out through the servants' passage like something to be discarded rather than mourned, that the last sound I hear as Ashgrave Pack's Luna is the front doors of my own home closing behind me for the final time.

I remember cold water. I remember the moon, indifferent and very far away.

I remember thinking, with the very last clear thought I get to have: he never even asked me if it was true.

Water fills my lungs, and I come back to life fighting.

It isn't gentle. Nothing about dying and getting yanked back from it, apparently, is gentle i break the surface of black river water in total, animal panic, clawing and gasping and choking on air like my body's forgotten the shape of the word breathe.

For one endless second there's nothing in the entire world except the desperate fact of alive, alive, I'm alive And then I notice my hands.

They're wrong. Leaner than mine, corded with a kind of hard, functional muscle I've never once possessed in my life, a jagged white scar slashed across the left forearm like something a blade left behind. I drag myself up onto a muddy bank on legs that don't yet know how to hold my weight properly, and when I press trembling fingers against my throat, searching for the claiming mark Rhys bit into my collarbone the night he told me I was his whole world.

There's nothing there. No mark. No scar. No proof I ever belonged to anyone at all.

I find a puddle silvered with moonlight and look down, and the scream that comes out of me is instant and total, because the face staring back isn't mine.

Sharper. Older by a handful of years. A thin white scar bisecting one dark eyebrow, and eyes that are black instead of my soft, familiar brown eyes that are, right now, wide with a fury my own face has never once been capable of making, not even tonight, not even while I was dying.

This isn't my body.

I don't get long to sit with the horror of that. Howling splits the night open somewhere behind me not the warm, layered pack-song I used to fall asleep to as Ashgrave's Luna, but something sharp and coordinated, closing in from three directions like a hunt in progress.

They're hunting her, I think, distant and strange, still shaking apart from my own death. Whoever this body belongs to. Which means they're hunting me now too.

I ran. I don't get far.

Three wolves break from the treeline and shift mid-stride into armed men, and the one in front, broad-shouldered, grey-eyed, a captain's insignia stitched into his collar looks at me like I'm already a corpse he's simply waiting on the paperwork for.

"Vera Sharp." He says the name like he's spitting out something rotten. "Did you really think the river was going to save you from your own execution?"

Vera Sharp.

The name detonates through me strangely, not like information, but like memory. Beneath conscious thought, in some place that isn't mine and yet apparently now is, this stolen body answers, muscle memory showing me, without my permission, exactly how to shift my weight, exactly where a blade should be resting against my hip if my hand goes looking.

I don't have time to be afraid of what that means. He's already lunging.

I move and it isn't grace, nothing like the careful elegance I spent years learning as a Luna.

It's brutal and precise, the instinct of a body that has clearly spent a long time learning exactly how to hurt people efficiently, and when my hand closes around a blade I didn't know I was carrying, I don't hesitate before driving it into his shoulder hard enough to put him screaming on the ground.

She's a killer, I think, watching my own borrowed hands do it like I'm standing somewhere outside myself. I'm wearing a killer.

The other two come at me together. This time, the soft, trusting woman I used to be the one who begged a man to look at her while he ordered her death freezes for one fatal second too long, and a fist catches my jaw hard enough to send me sprawling toward the water's edge.

Pain blooms bright and immediate. Underneath it: fury.

I think of Rhys's shoulders turned toward that window. I think of she's not this pack's problem after tonight. I think of every soft, breakable thing I used to let myself be, and how none of it kept me alive for even one more hour.

Never again, something in me decides, with a coldness I don't recognize and don't fight. Whoever this body was. Whoever I am now. I am never going to be that helpless again.

When the second man swings, I catch his wrist mid-strike with a speed that belongs to neither the old me nor, I think, entirely to Vera Sharp either some new, terrible alchemy of a Luna's discipline and an assassin's violence and break it with one sharp twist.

He drops, screaming. The third hesitates.

I don't kill him. Some small, stubborn piece of the old Wren won't let me, not yet, not like this. I hit him hard enough to put him down and then I run properly run, with a killer's stamina and a dead Luna's sheer stubborn refusal to stop, until the howling behind me fades into silence.

I stop, eventually, at the edge of a cliff over a valley I don't recognize, and let myself finally come apart.

Vera Sharp. Sentenced to execution at dawn for a crime I don't remember committing, seven years, the guard's words are already surfacing, half-heard, something about "the rogue queen's judgment," about a date that makes no sense at all against the calendar I remember dying on, before the night I actually died.

Seven years.

The number settles into my chest with a strange, sharp clarity that cuts straight through the panic, like the first cold edge of a plan.

Rhys Ashgrave will not become my murderer for another seven years. Marisol Thorne hasn't poisoned him against me yet hasn't even met me yet, in this backward, borrowed version of time.

The pup I lost doesn't exist in this timeline. Which means the version of me who trusted her mate enough to die still smiling at him, still hoping he'd turn around in time, hasn't been born into this life at all.

I have seven years to become someone Rhys Ashgrave will never be able to destroy.

I press my palm flat against the unfamiliar scar on my forearm, watching moonlight slide over knuckles that aren't mine and yet, now, are the only hands I have, and I feel something old and breakable in me die on purpose, quietly, without ceremony.

"My name," I say out loud, in a voice pitched lower and rougher than mine ever was, "is Vera Sharp."

I let the lie settle into my bones like a second skin.

Let them believe Wren Calloway drowned quietly that night and stayed dead. Let the whole world keep believing it.

Somewhere out there, seven years from now, an Alpha who once told me I was his entire world is going to meet a stranger with claws sharp enough to end him and he won't recognize the wife he murdered until it's far, far too late to matter.

The moon climbs higher, ancient and indifferent to all of it, and

I turn my back on the river that almost managed to keep me dead, and start walking toward the rest of my life.