The Alpha's Reborn Mistake

Chapter 6

CLARA

Finn handed me that paper and I read it twice and felt the world tilt sideways under my feet. My name. Lena's name. And a date beside each one. Lena's date was three years ago. The same week she died. My date was four days from now. "Where did you find this," I whispered.

Finn sat beside me and kept his voice low. "Diana had a meeting with two men I did not recognise. I heard them through the door. Clara they are going to frame you for poisoning Lucian. A vial in your room. A forged letter in your handwriting. A witness who will swear he saw you near his wine supply." The room felt very cold.

"We have to leave," Finn said. "Tonight."

"We cannot. The moment we cross the boundary without permission we become rogues. Lyra is too weak."

"She will not survive what Diana is planning either!"

"Finn." I looked at him steadily. "I need you to keep this paper safe. Tell nobody. Do nothing that lets Diana know you were in that corridor. Can you do that."

He looked at me for a long moment. "Clara I do not like this plan." "I know. Can you do it anyway." He nodded slowly and left.

I sat alone in the dark and thought about going to Lucian. I actually walked to his study door and raised my hand to knock. Then I heard Diana's voice inside and lowered my hand and walked away. The four days passed like a bad dream.

On the fourth morning four warriors came for me. Men whose names I knew. Whose children I had played with. They would not look at me as they marched me to the great hall. The entire pack was there.

Lucian stood at the front. Diana stood behind him with perfectly performed tears in her amber eyes. On the table in front of Lucian sat a glass vial, a forged letter and a written witness statement.

"Clara Voss," the council elder said. "You are accused of the attempted murder of Alpha Lucian Blackwell by poison. How do you answer."

"I did not do this," I said clearly. The elder looked at Lucian. Lucian looked at the evidence. He looked at Diana. He looked at the watching pack.

He did not look at me. Not once. Not for a single second. "I have seen enough," he said quietly. "Deal with it."

Three years. Three years of working and caring and trying and eating alone and watching him hand everything I built to someone else and letting Lyra fade inside my chest because he could not spare me five minutes of his time. Three years and when the moment came that mattered most he looked at a table full of lies and said deal with it without ever once looking at my face.

What came after that I will tell you plainly because you need to understand what they did to a woman who had spent three years serving this pack with everything she had.

They took me to the punishment grounds. All four of them. Lyra tried to rise and could not, she was too weak, she could only press against my ribs and make that small broken sound over and over while I endured things I will not name in full. It lasted a long time. Long enough that by the end I could not stand on my own.

When it was over they dragged me to the pack boundary and threw me across it into the Silver Forest like I was a bag of rubbish they needed rid of.

It was deep winter. No coat. The cold hit me like a wall of ice and did not stop hitting.

I could not walk. My legs would not hold me. So I crawled. Through the frozen dark of the Silver Forest with my hands going numb against the icy ground and my breath coming in ragged clouds and Lyra growing quieter with every passing minute. I crawled for three hours.

The rogue wolves smelled my blood long before I heard them. Six of them moving through the trees, silent the way predators are silent when they already know they have won. I had nothing left to fight with.I fought anyway.

With my hands and my teeth and every last bit of fury I had been swallowing for three years I fought those wolves in the snow until I physically could not lift my arms anymore. Until my body simply stopped responding to what I was telling it to do. I fell.

The snow was cold against my cheek. The Silver Forest was quiet around me, beautiful in the way that terrible things sometimes are, the bare branches silver against the dark sky and the moon hanging full and white above everything. I felt Lyra begin to go.

It was the quietest thing I have ever experienced. Like a warmth I had carried my whole life slowly leaving. She was there and then she was less there and then there was just a space where she used to be and that space was the loneliest thing I have ever felt.

"I know," I whispered to the empty place inside my chest. "I know."

I lay in the snow and looked up at the moon and thought about Finn's face. About Mrs Graye's warning. About every name I had ever learned in that pack and every person I had genuinely tried to help. About Lyra singing on my eighteenth birthday when everything still felt possible. About Lucian saying deal with it.

The cold stopped hurting after a while. That was how I knew it was nearly over. The pain goes first and then the cold goes and then everything goes quiet and soft and very far away.

My fingers curled into fists in the snow. The last thing they would do.

The last thought I had before the darkness took everything was not grief. It was not even fear. It was one question, burning and furious and absolutely clear.

If I could come back what would I do differently. Then darkness. Then nothing at all. Then warmth. So much warmth.

A ceiling. Pale cream. Curtains, faded blue. A bed underneath me that was soft and familiar in a way that made no sense because I had just been lying in the snow. I sat up. My hands. Smooth. Unscratched. Young.

I pressed them flat against my face and felt my own skin and the warmth of it and the absolute impossible reality of being alive.

Lyra pressed against my ribs. Small and weak and flickering like a candle in wind. But there.

She was there.

I pressed my hand flat against my chest and felt her and closed my eyes and sat in the dark of my childhood bedroom with every memory of the last three years burning behind my eyes like someone had branded them there permanently.

Every dismissal. Every cold grey glance. Every night alone. Every second of what they did to me on those punishment grounds. Lucian's face. Deal with it. I sat with all of it.

I let it settle into my bones like heat. Low and steady and clarifying.

Then I heard my mother's voice drifting up from downstairs and I knew exactly what was coming next because I had lived it before and this time I was going to live it completely differently. I stood up. I walked to the window.

Outside in the early morning light the Silver Forest sat at the edge of our territory, still and silver and waiting.

I looked at it for a long moment.

Then I said quietly to Lyra, to the empty room, to every version of myself that had ever bent under someone else's weight, "They think they buried me."

I touched the cold glass of the window with one finger. "They have no idea they planted a seed."

Downstairs my mother called my name. I turned from the window and walked toward the door and I was smiling.

And it was not a kind smile at all.