Reborn of The Omega He Threw Away

Nadia's POV The fire reached my hair before it reached my heart. I smelled it before I felt it smoke, and underneath the smoke, betrayal. My own pack stood in a circle around me. Nobody moved to help. Cade stood at the front of them, his jaw tight, his eyes empty. "Please," I whispered. "Talia lied. I never touched the sacred moonstone." He didn't answer. He just looked away. That was the last thing I saw before the flames took me. His face, turning from me, like I was nothing. Like three years of marriage meant less than a single whisper from someone else's mouth. Then cold air. Wet grass under my hands. An owl calling somewhere above me. I gasped and sat up so fast my head spun. I was not burning. I was not dying. I was kneeling in a dark forest, my school uniform soaked through with dew, my hands small and unscarred. Unscarred. I stared at my palms. Three years ago, a training accident had left a thin white line across my left palm. Right now, in the moonlight, my skin was smooth. No scar. No years. No ash. My heart slammed against my ribs so hard it hurt. I knew this forest. I knew this exact clearing, with the crooked oak tree and the flat gray rock beside it. This was the training ground behind Ashworth Pack territory. This was where I had first seen Cade Ashworth, three years before he became my husband. Three years before he let me burn without saying a single word to stop it. Voices came from the trees. Familiar ones, younger than I remembered them. "Nadia? Is that you out here?" It was Talia. My best friend. My killer. I froze. Every instinct told me to run, to scream, to claw her eyes out right there in the dirt. But another part of me, the part that had just watched itself die slowly and helplessly, went very still and very calm instead. If I was really back really seventeen again, really three years before the wedding, before the fire, before I trusted the wrong people with my whole heart then Talia did not know what I knew. Not yet. Nobody did. I stood up slowly, brushing wet leaves off my skirt, and forced my voice to sound light and easy. "Just clumsy. Tripped over a root in the dark." Talia stepped into the clearing with two other pack girls trailing behind her, giggling about something I couldn't hear. She looked so young. Soft, round cheeks, no cruelty sitting behind her eyes yet, or maybe I had simply never learned how to look hard enough before. "You scared me half to death," she said, laughing and looping her arm through mine like nothing in the world was wrong. "Come on, the Alpha's training session starts in ten minutes. You don't want to miss your first look at him." My first look at him. That meant it hadn't happened yet. The day I saw Cade Ashworth for the first time and felt the mate bond snap into place like a rope pulling tight around my chest. The day my whole life changed, for better and then so much worse than I could have imagined. I followed the girls out of the trees, my mind racing faster than my feet could carry me. I knew things now that nobody else in this pack knew. I knew Talia would smile in my face for three long years while planning to take my place as Luna. I knew Cade's brother, Dorian, would forge the evidence that ended my life. I knew the sacred moonstone theft was never a simple theft at all it was a trap, built slowly, patiently, by people I had once trusted with everything. I knew the ending, down to the smallest, cruelest detail. Nobody else standing in this field did. The path to the training grounds ran past the old well, past the dormitory row, past the same crooked fence post I used to trip over as a girl. Every step felt like walking through a memory that hadn't happened yet. I pressed my palm flat against my chest, willing my heart to slow down before anyone else noticed how hard it was pounding. Talia chattered beside me the whole way, oblivious, happy, still years away from the person she would eventually become. I studied her face sideways, hunting for any hint of the cruelty I now knew was waiting inside her. I found nothing. That frightened me more than if I had found something at all. We came out of the trees into the training grounds, and the whole pack was already gathered, murmuring, waiting. And there he was. Cade Ashworth stood at the front of them, tall and broad-shouldered, his dark hair damp from a morning run, his eyes sweeping the crowd like he was already tired of being watched by everyone around him. The bond hit me exactly the way I remembered it. A pull, low in my chest, like a hook sinking into my ribs and yanking hard. My breath caught in my throat. My wolf whined inside me, desperate and hopeful, the way she always had been about him, no matter what he later became to me. Last time, I had smiled instantly. Last time, I had let that pull carry me straight toward him, straight toward three years of fragile hope, straight toward a fire that took my life in the end. This time, I made myself look away first, even though it cost me something to do it. Talia noticed. Her eyes narrowed, just slightly, just for a heartbeat, before the sweet smile came sliding back into place. "You okay? You look really pale all of a sudden." "I'm fine," I said, and my voice barely shook at all. I was not fine. I was standing in front of the man who would one day watch me die and say absolutely nothing to stop it. And somehow, impossibly, unfairly, I had a second chance to make sure that ending never happened again. But as Cade's gaze finally swept across the crowd and landed on me really landed, his eyes going wide, his whole body going still like the world had stopped turning I realized something that made my stomach twist with dread. He felt it too. Right now, for the very first time. And the way he was staring at me, like I was the only person standing in that whole crowded clearing, told me this life was not going to be nearly as easy to rewrite as I had hoped it would be.