The Second Time I Chose Me

I felt everything. That was the part no one told you about dying. It wasn't peaceful. It wasn't quiet. It was every nerve you had left screaming at once until they couldn't anymore. The scalpel was silver. I knew what that meant the moment I saw it. Silver doesn't just cut wolf skin it poisons it. Slows the healing. Keeps you open when everything in you is trying to close. Whoever chose that blade didn't want me to survive the table. I didn't. But I woke up anyway. I was staring at a ceiling I hadn't seen in six years the soft cream paint of my childhood bedroom with the tiny water stain near the window that my mother always said she was going to fix. The morning light was doing that thing it did in summer, stretching long and gold across my floor, landing on the rug my grandmother made me. "Zara." My mother's voice came through the door. "You're going to be late, baby. Get up." I didn't move. I couldn't. Because my name in her voice, easy and warm and completely unbothered, had just broken me in half. "Zara." "Coming," I heard myself say. My voice was steady. I don't know how. I sat up and looked at my hands. Young hands. Smooth. No swelling in the knuckles from where I'd gripped the restraints. No bruising. I pressed both palms flat against my stomach and just breathed. Flat. Unhurt. Empty in the way I was before he ever touched me, not in the way I was after. The door opened and my mother leaned in, already dressed, already put together, her locs pinned up and her amber eyes the same ones I inherited moving over me with that particular look she had when she was deciding how much time she had to be worried. "Happy birthday," she said. She smiled. "Eighteen. Come on." I got up and I walked to her and I hugged her so hard she made a sound. "Okay," she laughed, patting my back. "Okay, okay. I saw you yesterday." "I know." I pressed my face into her shoulder. "I know." She let me stay there for a moment, longer than she probably planned, before she pulled back and held my face in her hands. "What's going on in that head of yours?" Everything, I thought. Six years. A pup. A silver blade. Your face at a funeral I wasn't supposed to know about. "Just being dramatic," I said. She narrowed her eyes at me the way she did when she knew I was lying but didn't have enough information to push yet. Then she kissed my forehead and stepped back. "Breakfast is ready. Come down before Priya eats it all." She left. I stood in my old room and looked around at the girl I used to be. There was a corkboard on the wall with photos from the school year me and Cassidy making ridiculous faces, a group photo from the fall run, a picture of the pack lands at sunrise that I'd taken on a disposable camera. There were sticky notes with homework reminders. A stack of books I actually meant to read. A small shelf of the awards I'd won in junior rankings. I remembered the last time I stood in this room. I had been so excited. Eighteen meant the mate bond could activate. Eighteen meant my life was finally starting. I hadn't known it was ending. I pulled open my closet and got dressed slowly, thinking. The date was burned into me early June, six years back, the morning everything changed the first time around. I knew exactly where Callum Reeves was right now. I knew exactly what he was doing, who he was with, and how he would look at me when he first caught my scent at the summer gathering in two weeks. I knew what his hands felt like. I knew the sound he made when he laughed at something that surprised him. I knew every version of his face. I also knew what his voice sounded like when he gave the order that ended my life. I pulled my hair up, looked at myself in the mirror, and made myself a promise. Not him. Never again. Whatever it costs. I heard Priya before I saw her. She was on the phone, halfway down the hall, and even at eighteen her voice had that particular edge sweetness sitting on top of something colder. I slowed my steps without meaning to and listened. "I'm just saying," she said, "if she shows up to the gathering and he scents her, I'm done. I'll lose my mind, Megan. I swear." A pause. "Because he's mine. He's been mine. I've put in the work, okay? I've been at every event, I've worn the right things, I've…" Another pause. "No, she doesn't know anything. She's just going to waltz in there and ruin everything without even trying." I stepped into the hallway. She spun around. We looked at each other. She was beautiful in the way that makes people trust you too fast neat features, warm skin, always put together. Her eyes were her tell. They went flat when she was calculating, and right now they were very flat. "I'll call you back." She ended the call. "Good morning," I said. "Were you listening?" "You were loud." I walked past her toward the stairs. "Also, you were in my room yesterday." She was quiet for a second. I could feel her deciding whether to deny it. "I was looking for my scarf." "You don't own anything in my closet." I stopped at the top of the stairs and looked back at her. "Don't do it again." Her jaw tightened. "You don't scare me, Zara." "I know," I said simply. "That's going to be a problem for you." I went downstairs. My mother's husband, Marcus, was at the table with his coffee and his newspaper, looking exactly like a man who had decided the world was manageable if you just didn't look at it too hard. He nodded at me. I nodded back. He wasn't a bad man. That was the complicated thing about Marcus. He loved Priya the way fathers are supposed to love daughters, fiercely and without conditions. He just loved her in a way that had always left no room to question what she was doing. "Morning," he said. "Morning." I sat down and my mother set a plate in front of me eggs, plantain, toast, the birthday breakfast she made me every year without fail. I looked at it and felt something in my throat tighten. "You okay?" she asked quietly, sitting beside me. "Yeah." I picked up my fork. "Mom, can I ask you something?" "Mm." "What if I didn't want a mate?" She looked at me. "Right now, or in general?" "In general. What if I met him and I just didn't want it?" She was quiet for a moment, turning her mug in her hands. Marcus had put down his newspaper. "The bond isn't a command," my mother said carefully. "It's a pull. A very strong pull. But you can reject it." "And if he's someone important? Someone whose family would make it complicated?" "Zara." Her voice had changed. It was slower now, more deliberate. "What do you know?" "Nothing for sure." I held her gaze. "I just want to know what my options are." She looked at me for a long time. My mother was not the kind of woman who believed in coincidences. She was also not the kind of woman who panicked before she had enough information. "Eat your breakfast," she said finally. "We'll talk after." Priya came in from upstairs and sat across from me. She looked at my plate and then at my face and I watched her try to read me. I gave her nothing. I had learned, in six years of living beside a woman who could weaponize a smile, exactly how to go blank. Her eyes dropped first. I ate my birthday breakfast and I thought about everything I needed to do, every move I needed to make, every conversation I had to have before the summer gathering put me in the same air as Callum Reeves. I had two weeks. Two weeks to become someone he couldn't reach.