The Second Time I Chose Me

CHAPTER 2

My mother sent Marcus to the hardware store after breakfast.

It wasn't subtle, but she didn't try to make it subtle. She just looked at him over her coffee and said, "I need those hinges for the back door today," and he was gone in ten minutes. Priya had disappeared upstairs to do whatever Priya did when she wasn't performing for an audience.

My mother closed the kitchen door, sat across from me, and folded her hands.

"Talk."

I had been thinking about how much to say since I woke up. The whole truth felt impossible, six years in another life, a mate who gave the order that killed me, a baby I held once on a table while I bled out. How do you say that? How do you make someone believe it without sounding like the kind of person who needs help they can't give you?

But my mother's face was not a face that was going to accept half a story.

"I think my mate is Callum Reeves," I said.

She didn't move. "The Ironveil Alpha's son."

"Yes."

She was quiet. Then: "What makes you think that?"

"Priya thinks so too. You heard what she said. He scented something that was mine."

"That's not confirmation."

"No," I agreed. "But I know what it feels like when something is pointing at you, and this is pointing at me." I kept my voice flat and even, the way my father had always told me to speak when I needed someone to hear substance instead of emotion. "If it is him, I don't want it. I don't want to be in that pack. I don't want to be his Luna. I want to reject it and I want to leave before the gathering."

My mother's face went through several things at once. I watched her get there.

"Zara. An Alpha's first mate…"

"I know." My jaw was tight. "I know what it means for his transition of power. I know what his family would say. I know the politics of it." I looked at her directly. "I don't care. I would rather figure out another way to live than walk into something I already know is going to destroy me."

She went very still. "What do you mean, already know?"

I had prepared for this. "I mean that when I think about it, all I see is how badly it ends. I can't explain it better than that. I just know. The way you know when a storm is coming even before the clouds."

She stared at me. My mother was not a superstitious woman, but she was a wolf. And wolves respected the things you couldn't explain with words.

"How certain are you?" she asked.

"Completely."

She exhaled through her nose. "What do you want to do?"

"I want to go to Dad's for the summer." I watched her face. "I want to be away from here before the gathering. And I want to learn how to mask my scent so that if we end up in the same space later, he doesn't know."

Her eyebrows lifted slightly. "Where did you hear about scent masking?"

"I've been reading." That was true enough. In my first life, I'd read everything I could get my hands on after it was already too late. In this one, I'd had six years of memories to work with.

She looked at the window. I watched her thinking, watched the way she weighed things what was practical, what was protective, what was the cost of each choice.

"Your father would have to agree," she said. "The Alpha here would have to allow it."

"I know. Will you call dad?"

She looked back at me. "Why are you so afraid of this, baby?"

The question was gentle. It was the kind of gentle that meant she already knew the answer wasn't simple, and she was giving me room to give her a real one.

"Because I've watched what it looks like when someone loves a person who hasn't earned it," I said. "And I don't want that to be me."

She flinched. Small and fast, but I saw it. She knew I was looking in her direction without looking in her direction, and she was smart enough to understand what I was saying without me having to say it.

She picked up her phone. She called my father.

He answered on the second ring.

I sat across from my mother and listened to half a conversation her side careful and measured, his side getting louder and more intense until she held the phone away from her ear and mouthed he's fine at me. She talked him down, or rather she just stayed quiet until he ran out of momentum, which was the way most conversations with Felix Cole worked.

By the end, the plan was set. Dayo, his beta, a man I'd called uncle my whole life was already on his way.

"He's sending someone to get you today," my mother said when she hung up.

"Today?" I sat up straighter.

"Your father does not do slow when he's decided something." She gave me a look that was equal parts exasperation and affection. "Go pack. And pack enough you're staying through August."

"Thank you." I meant it from somewhere deep.

She reached across the table and grabbed my hand. "I need you to promise me something."

"What?"

"That you will tell me everything when you come back. Not half. Everything."

I met her eyes. "I promise."

She held my gaze for another moment checking, the way she always checked then let go of my hand and stood. "Go pack before your sister comes back downstairs and turns this into a scene."

I was up and moving before she finished the sentence.

I had barely filled my second bag when the door to my room opened.

I didn't turn around. The step was too light to be my mother, and the pause in the doorway was too deliberate. I set down the folded jacket in my hands and waited.

"You're leaving."

Priya's voice was different in here, in small spaces where she didn't have an audience. Thinner. More honest.

"For the summer." I kept folding.

"Don't." She stepped further in. "Don't do that thing where you make it sound like nothing."

I turned around. She was standing near my dresser, arms crossed, and she looked younger than she usually let herself look. Uncertain. Almost real.

"What do you want me to say, Priya?"

"I want you to admit what you know." Her voice was tight. "You know he's yours. And you're leaving so I can have him."

I looked at her carefully. In my first life, this was where I would have laughed. Or gotten angry. Or tried to explain myself, tried to be reasonable, tried to close the distance between us because I still wanted her to be a sister instead of a threat.

"You can have him," I said.

She blinked. "What?"

"I don't want him." I turned back to my bag. "I don't want the title, the pack, the politics, or any part of what comes with it. You want it? Take it. I'm not competing with you."

The silence behind me stretched out long enough that I looked back.

She was staring at me like I was something she'd never seen before.

"You're serious."

"I'm packing my bags."

She uncrossed her arms. Something moved across her face that I couldn't fully name, relief, maybe, but underneath it something more complicated. Something almost like disappointment. Like she'd spent so long preparing for a fight that not getting one felt like a loss.

"Then why are you so calm?" she said.

"Because I'm not fighting you, Priya." I zipped up the bag. "But let me be very clear about one thing."

She waited.

"Don't come into my room again. Don't touch my things. And don't make the mistake of thinking that me stepping back means I'm afraid of you." I picked up my bag and faced her fully. "I stepped back because I chose to. That's a very different thing."

She held my gaze. Her jaw worked. Then she walked out.

I stood in my room for a moment after she left, listening to her footsteps down the hall, to the sound of her door closing, to the ordinary noise of the house continuing around all of it.

Then I picked up my second bag and went downstairs to wait for Dayo.

He pulled up in a dark car with the windows cracked, and I had barely made it to the door before he was out and already talking.

"You are going to be the death of your father," Dayo said. He was grinning. He was always grinning. He was tall and thin with long braids and eyes that looked like they were deciding whether to take you seriously at any given moment. "He has called me four times in the last two hours."

"He didn't have to send you personally." I handed him one of my bags. He took it without being asked.

"He absolutely had to. He said, and I quote: 'Go get my daughter before something happens and I have to go get her myself and burn everything down.'" Dayo raised an eyebrow. "So I went."

I laughed. The first real laugh since I woke up. It came out a little rough, a little too fast, but Dayo caught it and softened just slightly.

"You okay, Z?" He was looking at me now, the grin still there but quieter.

"I will be." I meant it. "Once I'm out of here."

He looked at the house once, then nodded. "Then let's go."

My mother stood in the doorway and watched us load the car. I went to her and she held me for a long time, longer than she probably meant to, and I felt the slight trembling in her that she was trying to hide.

"Call me when you land," she said into my hair.

"Every day," I said back.

She let me go. I got in the car.

As Dayo pulled out of the drive and the house got smaller in the window, I let myself breathe. Actually breathe, for what felt like the first time.

I had two weeks before the gathering. One summer before the world tried again to put me back in a box I'd already died in.

And for the first time in either life, I was going toward something instead of running from it