The Luna's Time Loop

Three Days

By the second morning the cold had teeth.

It had been a full day since the woods, a full day since Sebastian's hands, and my body was learning exactly what it cost to be apart from the only thing that steadied it. The frost had climbed out of my marrow and into everything. My fingers stayed numb. My breath fogged even in the warm rooms. Twice I had caught my hand shaking so hard I had to sit on it.

Food had stopped helping. Fire had stopped helping. I sat close enough to the hearth to scorch my skirts and the frost stayed in me, patient, like it knew something I didn't. Twice in the night I woke clawing at my own chest, sure the blade had come back, and found nothing there but the cold and the dark and the ghost of a pair of hands two territories away.

And behind my ribs, always, the memory of the silver.

They had put two guards on my door. For my safety, Jax said, with the war so close and strangers in the woods. I knew what they really were. I had been a princess long enough to know a cage dressed up as a courtesy.

The seamstresses came at midday with the binding gown, yards of Silverwood silver that pooled cold against my skin, and they pinned and murmured and would not meet my eyes. I stood on the stool and let them turn me and stared at the wall and counted. Two days now. Then one. Then the mark. Then, if this loop ran like the last, the silver.

The silk was beautiful. That was the cruelest part of it. Someone had spent months on it, thread by thread, a gown fit for the last daughter of the oldest line, and every stitch of it was a shroud, and only I knew.

A young girl held the mirror while they worked, someone's daughter, no older than twelve, and she kept stealing looks at me like I had stepped out of a story. The lost princess. The last of the line. I wanted to tell her to run. I wanted to tell her the story does not end the way they promise. I held still and let them dress me for my own funeral and said nothing to the child at all.

I had to be gone before then. But a locked girl learns nothing and saves no one, so first I had to know why.

That afternoon I slipped my guards.

It was easy, in the end. A princess knows her own walls, and I had grown up finding the servants' passages behind the tapestries, the hollow places where a small girl could hide from a temper. The passages smelled of old stone and candle smoke and a hundred years of dust. I went sideways through the narrow places, one hand on the cold wall, following the murmur of voices the way a child follows a lullaby, toward a light I already knew I didn't want to reach.

He was in the old chapel, the one no one used, and he was not alone.

Through the gap in the stone I saw the other one. Robed. Hooded. A pendant catching the candlelight, an eclipse worked in black iron. The Cult. Here, inside my father's house, standing across from the man I was meant to marry in two days.

"The high packs won't kneel," the robed one was saying. "Not to you. Not to anyone. Not while they can still call on her line."

"They won't have her line much longer," Jax said. "The binding takes it. Her blood, her wolf, all of it comes to me at the mark. After that the old bloodlines are broken and the packs have nothing left to rally to."

"And the girl?"

Jax was quiet for a moment.

"The binding is not kind to what it hollows out," he said. "She may not survive it. That is a mercy, in its way. She was never going to survive the war."

"She suspects nothing?" the robed one said.

"She suspects everything and knows nothing," Jax said. "She's been strange for weeks. Flinching. Cold to the touch. I think grief is unmaking her. It doesn't matter. In two days it's done, and a grieving girl makes a very convincing sacrifice."

I stood very still in the dark and did not breathe.

So that was the blade. Not a knife in the night, not an enemy in the woods. It was him. It was the mark itself, the thing dressed in silver and called a wedding, and it had killed me once already and I had never even seen the hand that held it.

Something in my chest cracked open.

It was not grief. It was the wolf.

She came up out of me all at once, faster than I could hold, wild with the fury I had swallowed for two days and a hundred deaths. My spine bowed. My hands curled, and the bones under the skin began to move, to lengthen, wrong and fast, and a whine tore out of me that I couldn't stop.

Heat poured off me in the freezing dark. My sight doubled. Somewhere far off I heard the robed one go quiet, heard Jax say what was that, and it was the only thing that saved me, the knowledge that one more sound would bring the wall down and take me with it.

Not here. Not in the walls, ten feet from Jax and his hooded friend, with two days left and everything to lose.

I bit down on my own hand until the pain gave me something to hold. I forced her back down an inch at a time, shaking, sweating in the cold, until the bones settled and the whine died in my throat and I was only a girl again, folded in the dark, listening to my own ragged breathing.

She had never done that before. In all my loops my wolf had grieved and raged, but she had never tried to tear her way out of me in a corridor. Something was breaking. The deaths were stacking up faster than my body could carry them.

I couldn't do this alone. I couldn't survive two more days of this cold, and I couldn't stop what was coming from inside a locked room. I needed the one thing that quieted the curse, and I needed an ally who wanted Jax's plans in ruins as badly as I was starting to.

It was a mad thing to want. An enemy. The commander of the packs that had spilled Silverwood blood for a generation. But he had held me in the woods and let me go, and Jax had held me in his own house and called it love while he sharpened the knife. I had spent a hundred lifetimes trusting the wrong wolf. Maybe it was time to bet on the one who frightened me honestly.

I had watched Jax lie to my face and call it devotion. I had watched an enemy tell me one ugly truth in the rain and then carry me home through it. Somewhere between the two, the whole shape of what I trusted had turned over. It should have frightened me. Mostly it made me tired, and then, slowly, it made me certain.

That night I dressed in dark clothes and waited for the house to sleep. I would go back to the border. I would find him, or leave a scent for his wolf to follow, and I would tell him enough of the truth to make him useful.

I was reaching for the latch on my window when the air in the room changed.

Not a sound. A weight. The sense of being watched that I had felt in the woods, here, now, on the wrong side of the wards.

I turned.

He was standing in the shadow by the cold hearth, rain still dark on his shoulders, gold eyes fixed on me like he had walked straight out of the thought I'd been thinking.

"You shouldn't be here," I breathed. "You crossed into Silverwood. If they catch you they will kill you where you stand."

Sebastian didn't move.

"You think a wall was going to keep me from that scent," he said.