The Alpha Who Let His Luna Die Twice

Chapter 1: Three Days I Already Lived

Odalys's POV

My fingers pressed against my collarbone, hunting for a wound that wasn't there anymore, heat instantly rushed through my body, as I was trying to understand the situation.

Smooth skin. No claw marks. No blood drying under my nails.

The door opened before I answered the knock. Ines came in first, arms full of ivory silk. She held the gown up, checking the hem against the light.

"Three days until the wedding, I still need to let the waist out. You've gone and gotten thin on me, my lady."

"I've been eating."

"Not enough of it." Three days?

I sat up slowly and let my heart settle before I answered. My eyes went to the crack over the window, shaped like lightning. Same room. Same crack.

A different night was still coming for me. I just didn't know when.

“Three days," I said back. My voice came out steadier than I expected.

Ines pinned the hem while I answered her questions about lace and seating charts.

"Front row, left side. Your father wants the Amsel cousins there instead of the Ferro elders."

"Let him have it."

"And the officiant. Same one who did your parents' vows, or would you rather someone younger?"

"Same one." I didn't look up. "Some things should stay the way they've always been."

She didn't know what that sentence cost me. Half my attention stayed on her. The other half went hunting for cracks in the pattern of the day. Which guests made the list. Which rooms had new locks. Whether the kitchen still burned the bread on Tuesdays the way it always had.

Small things first. If small things had already shifted, maybe the big one could too.

"Lord Castellane's gift came this morning. Before dawn, thats so nice of him right? "

Nice?

I crossed the room and lifted the lid on a small lacquered box. A collar of pale moonstone sat inside. Beautiful. Formal. Cold as the man who sent it.

No note. No line in his own hand. Just a servant's tag confirming delivery.

I remembered a version of this morning where the gift came with four words scrawled on paper. I couldn't remember what the words said anymore. Only that they existed, and that they made me laugh before I could stop myself.

I caught myself laughing now too, at some old joke Talia told me years back about wedding night nerves. My shoulders dropped an inch before I caught them doing it.

Then I remembered what being alive was about to cost me.

"My lady?" Ines had stopped stitching. "You've gone somewhere else."

"Tired." I kept my eyes on the mirror instead of her. "Three days of fittings will do that to a person."

She laughed and went back to the hem.

"Ines."

"Mm?"

"Has anyone new joined the household staff? In the last month?"

She thought about it, needle paused midair. "None that I know of. Why?"

"No reason." I made myself smile. "Curious."

She didn't push. That was one of the things I liked about her.

The rest of the day I found reasons to walk past the guard rotations, the kitchen stores, my father's study. Small proofs, gathered one at a time.

Two guards I recognized at the east gate. A new lock on the wine cellar that hadn't been there before. The same cracked flagstone outside the kitchen door that had tripped me as a girl, still uneven, still exactly where it had always been.

Outside my father's study I slowed without meaning to. His voice carried through the door, low and even, talking through arrangements with someone whose voice I didn't recognize. I stood there a moment longer than I should have.

I couldn't make out the words. Only the tone. Careful. “This kind men use when they don't want to be overheard saying something ugly”.

Said to myself in the head.

I kept walking before anyone noticed me standing there.

By evening I had a working theory. No part of this was guaranteed to run the same course as before. Which meant no part of the ending was guaranteed either, that should have been my hope.

My stomach dropped instead, hard and sudden, the kind of drop that has no bottom to it.

Talia let herself in without waiting for an answer, the way she always did, while I was changing for bed.

"You're doing the thing."

"What thing."

"The thing where you go quiet and stare at the wall and pretend you're fine."

"I am fine."

"See." She pointed at my face. "That's the exact face you made right before you told me you'd passed your first combat trial. You hadn't."

"That was one time."

"That was that face."

"Talk to me," she said, and dropped onto my bed like she owned it.

"I can't."

"Can't or won't?"

I opened my mouth to answer. Nothing came out. There were too many words behind my teeth and not one of them was safe yet.

"Fine. Don't talk. But I'm not leaving until you look like a person again."

"You could just leave."

"I could." She kicked off her boots and stretched out beside me anyway. "I'm not going to."

"You have your own wedding to help plan. Yours is next year."

"Mine can wait. Yours is in three days." She propped herself up on one elbow. "That's the part you keep forgetting when you look at me like that."

She stayed an hour. She talked about the seating chart. She talked about which cousin was guaranteed to embarrass himself before the first toast, and which aunt would cry loud enough to be heard from the back row.

"You're not even listening," she said at one point.

"I am."

"What did I just say."

"Something about the aunt."

"Close enough." She bumped her shoulder against mine. "You're allowed to be somewhere else in your head. Just don't disappear on me completely."

"I won't."

"You already have. A little." She said it lightly. It didn't feel light.

I let her voice fill the room after that. The tight place under my ribs eased. I could breathe again without counting each one. She was definitely a fun person you would talk to, and in the midst of the conversation you forget your worries. As she was about leaving, she squeezed my hand at the door.

"Three more days," she said. "Then you're someone's wife and I get to boss you around even more."

"Can't wait," I said, and meant it less than she knew.

The moonstone collar still sat untouched on the dresser when I finally lay down. I stared at the crack over the window until my eyes blurred.

A folded scrap of paper slid under the door.

I was across the room before I let myself think, snatching it up with fingers that weren't quite steady. One line. A hand I didn't know.

“Some debts do not die with the person who owed them.”

I read it twice. Then a third time, like the words might rearrange themselves into something less true.

I stood in the middle of my room, the paper shaking a little in my grip. The ache under my collarbone flared hot, worse than it had all day. My hand went to it without my permission, the same habit I would need to break before someone else saw it.

My legs folded before I told them to. I sat down hard on the edge of the bed, the note still in my fist, and didn't move for a long time.

The candle burned lower. I didn't get up to trim it.

Three days left.

Someone else already knew exactly how little time that was.