Dear, God! NO!

February. It was February, I remember the cold. Not the poetic kind, not frost on windowpanes or the bite of a winter morning that makes you pull your cloak tighter and laugh into the steam of your own breath. No. I remember the cold that eats. The kind that starts in your feet, climbs your shins like something alive, and settles into your marrow until your bones feel like iron rods driven into frozen earth. I remember lying on the stone floor of that cell, my fingernails cracked and black, my lips too stiff to form the words I wanted to scream. I remember the sound of celebration drifting down through the dungeon grate. Music. Laughter. The clink of crystal. I remember knowing with the absolute certainty of the dying, that my husband was up there, his hand on another woman's waist, his mouth warm with wine, toasting to a future I had paid for with my name, my land, my bloodline. Everything I had given him freely, because I had loved him, and love had made me a fool. The last thing I felt was not sadness. It was not even rage. It was something quieter and more terrible than both, it was clarity. I understood, in those final shivering seconds, that I had been nothing to Carlin Ellotris. Not a wife. Not a partner. A key to a door, and once the door was open, the key was thrown away. Then the cold swallowed me whole, and I died. And then I opened my eyes to flowers. White gardenias. Cascading down in thick, fragrant ropes from an arbor made of pale birch wood, their petals soft against the afternoon light. I knew this arbor. I knew the way the sun came through the stained glass of the cathedral behind it, throwing colored diamonds across the flagstones. I knew the hush of the crowd, the rustle of silk, the distant bleating of ceremonial horns. I was standing at the altar. My altar. Our altar. The bouquet was in my hands, white roses bound with gold ribbon, trembling because my fingers were trembling, because every nerve in my body was screaming with the memory of ice and stone and death. "Lila." Carlin's voice. Smooth and warm as honeyed mead, exactly as I remembered it from the first time. He stood before me in his wedding coat, deep navy with silver embroidery, his chestnut hair swept back from that handsome, lying face. His blue eyes were bright with what any fool would call love. I had been that fool once. I had looked into those eyes and seen a future. Now I looked into them and saw a frozen cell. "Lila, darling, you look pale." He reached for my hand. His fingers were warm. Of course they were. Carlin was always warm. That was the trick of him, all that surface heat concealing the nothing underneath. I flinched. His smile flickered. Just a fraction. Just enough for me to see the tiny calculation behind it, the way his gaze swept to the crowd and back, assessing whether anyone had noticed. In my first life, I had not seen that flicker. In my first life, I had smiled back and given him my hand and sealed my own death. Not this time. The priestess was speaking. I could hear her voice as though from underwater, the old words of binding, the invocations to the spirits of hearth and home. The crowd was enormous, half the noble houses of the realm, emissaries from the coastal merfolk, a delegation from the mountain clans. This wedding was not a union of love. It was a political spectacle, and I was the centerpiece, the daughter of a fallen house with just enough ancestral land to make her worth marrying. I looked down at the bouquet. White roses. Gold ribbon. My knuckles were dark against the pale petals, and I could see the faintest tremor running through the stems. You died. You died on a stone floor with no one to hold your hand, and he did not even come to watch. I opened my fingers. The bouquet hit the flagstones with a sound like a small, soft heartbreak. Every petal seemed to shiver. The priestess stopped mid-syllable. The crowd inhaled as one. Carlin's eyes went sharp. "Lila, what?" "No." One word. I had spent a lifetime, a whole life and a death, earning the right to say it. It tasted like iron and fire on my tongue. "No," I said again, louder, and I turned from him. The crowd erupted. I heard gasps, the scrape of chairs, Carlin's voice rising behind me in that tone I knew so well: controlled, reasonable, the voice of a man accustomed to steering the room. "Lila, you're unwell. Someone fetch her some... " But I was already walking. Down the aisle, past the rows of stunned faces, past the gardenias and the stained glass and the golden banners bearing our joined family crests. My wedding gown was heavy, layers of ivory silk and hand-stitched lace dragging behind me like the tail of some great pale serpent, and I gathered it in my fists and walked faster. I did not know where I was going. I only knew I was going away. The cathedral doors were open to the summer air. Beyond them lay the courtyard, and beyond the courtyard lay the road, and beyond the road, the deep forest. The dark wall of ancient pines that bordered our town of Halfordshire like a warning. No one went into those woods. Not the hunters, not the soldiers, not even Carlin's Wolf-Hunters, those elite killers who served the King's Shadow Court. The forest belonged to something older and more dangerous than any of them. I was halfway across the courtyard when I felt it. A prickling along the back of my neck, a heaviness in the air, as though the world had drawn a breath and was holding it. The light changed, it shifted from warm gold to something deeper, amber-tinged, and I smelled pine resin and blood and rain on stone. He was standing at the tree line. I had never seen Victor before, not in my first life. He had been a story, a rumor, a name spoken in whispers to frighten children and unsettle lords. The Lost Alpha. The Mad Prince. The Beast in the Pines. Carlin had spoken of him once, late at night after too much wine, and even then there had been something in his voice that went beyond contempt something that sounded, if you listened carefully, like fear. Now I understood why. He was enormous. Not merely tall but vast, a wall of muscle and sinew that seemed to belong to the ancient trees behind him more than to any human gathering. His hair was wild and long, a tangle of gold that caught the light like a mane, and his face, his face was not a nobleman's face. It was rough and scarred and heavy-browed, the face of something that had been made to fight and had never stopped. His jaw could have been carved from the same stone as the mountains, and when his lips parted slightly, I saw the fangs. Long, sharp, unmistakable. But it was his eyes that stopped me. Amber. Bright, burning amber with pupils slit vertically like a predator's, and they were fixed on me with an intensity that made the air between us feel like a bowstring pulled taut. He was utterly still, every line of that massive body coiled with restrained power, and I realized with a jolt that he had been watching. He had been watching from the tree line, this feral exile, this enemy of everything Carlin represented, and he had seen me drop the bouquet. He had seen me say no. Something passed between us in that moment. I cannot name it. It was not anything so tender, It was recognition. The recognition of one caged thing looking at another and understanding the shape of the bars. Behind me, the cathedral doors burst open. I heard boots on stone, Carlin's voice raised in command, the clatter of guards mobilizing. "Bring her back. Now!" I ran. The gown tore on the courtyard's rough cobbles. I felt the lace rip away from my ankles, felt the silk shred, and I did not care. I ran toward the tree line, toward the impossible figure standing in its shadow, and with every step the old world fell away behind me: the altar, the vows, the golden cage of my first life crumbling like ash. Victor did not move until I was close enough to touch. Then his hand shot out, massive, scarred, those sharp claw-like nails catching the light, and closed around my wrist. Not gently. His grip was iron, and when he pulled me forward, I stumbled against his chest and felt the sheer heat of him, the furnace-burn of a body that ran hotter than any human's. He smelled like the deep woods, like pine sap and earth and something darker, muskier, purely animal. His amber eyes swept over my face. Up close, they were terrifying luminous, inhuman, slit-pupiled and utterly unblinking. His gaze dropped to my lips, to the hollow of my throat where my pulse was hammering, and then back up. His mouth curved. It was not a smile. It was a promise.