LUNA'S REVENGE: REBORN FOR LOVE

AMY’S POV Do you ever catch that feeling when you know you've been leading a lie? That little knot in your belly when everything you're sure of is unravelling at the seams? Well, try living that with a very sharp blade to your throat. The metal was icy but it scorched. Colder than the August breeze whipping through the pine forest, colder even than the bottom of Damian's eyes when at last he snapped into focus to regard me. I must have known right from the first message that something was wrong the moment he sent me out to come and visit him here, miles away from pack house, in the middle of nowhere. I was so god-damned stoked on the message I didn't even pause. Oh God, I was such an i***t. "You really thought he loved you." Selena's husky voice in my ear, her tones dripping with laughter. She was loving this moment. "Poor little Amy. Always so eager to please everyone and so naive." I was going to yell at her to get out, but the knife sank deeper into my flesh, and I could muster no more than a gasp. Meanwhile, I caught sight of Damian. He was standing fifteen feet away from me, wearing the black leather jacket that I had been holding back for three months on his birthday. Those were moments when I still had hopes that one day we would be together. "Damian, please." My words shook as if I were sixteen again and not twenty-four. "Just… Just look at me." He did whirl around at the time, and I was sorry the moment he did. His face was distant and unyielding, the face of a stranger who had been awakened from some task. Where was the man who had loved me only hours before? Who had said he could not exist without me as he drew designs on my naked flesh? "It was all an act, Amy," he said, his tone level. "You played your part for a while, but things shifted." My heart actually didn't break. They always say that, but I'm telling you, I felt it cracking in my chest. Three years, three years of thinking I had found my soulmate, my other half, my one and only person for me in the universe. And then I remembered. The baby—Our baby. My other hand instinctively went to my bare tummy, which was holding a very special secret. I had just discovered and spent hours practicing how to tell him. I was so excited, I even purchased those silly little wolf booties at the town general store, in hopes they would tickle him and kiss me. "I have something to tell you," I began, but Selena held her hand around the knife. "What you have to say is irrelevant now, honey." She moved closer to Damian, her perfectly manicured hand tracing down his arm, as if he were hers. Perhaps he was. "You're a glitch that needs to be erased." I noticed the tension in his jaw, the small muscle at the edge of his cheek quiver the way it did when he was strained. For a half-beat of a heartbeat, I thought perhaps he had gotten cold feet. Perhaps he would remember the things we had understood once upon a time, the significance we had been to each other. But Selena leaned against his side then, and his expression grew cold once more. "Do it," he said to me, and in those two words my last soul perished. Do it. As if I didn't exist. As if the three years we've spent together, the things we've planned, the future I'd envisioned – as if none of that had ever mattered to him, ever. "The pack won't be convinced by any tale you invent," I told him, though by now my own eyes were welling up with tears. "They know how much we—" "Love each other?" Selena had laughed, and it was the most hideous sound I'd ever witnessed. "Oh darling, they'll believe whatever we say. That you couldn't handle being Luna, that you ran off and married some east rebel. Poor Damian, all by himself as always. He'll need someone to comfort him." She was correct, and we were living in that world. Damian is the alpha—you follow his lead. If he says that I abandoned the pack and left him behind, no one will ever question what he's saying. They'd even catch themselves pitying him. The silver knife cut deeper, and I could scent my own blood beneath the pine and on wet earth. My wolf whined inside me, growing stronger and weaker as the poison flowed through my body. Silver alone was capable of harming us, killing us. "Know what's ironic?" Selena exhaled her hot air against my ear. "He didn't even want you. I was the one he wanted all along. You were just…practicing." That hurt worse than the knife. Worse than knowing I was going to die. Knowing that all that had happened between us had been a game to him, that I never truly meant anything until he could have what he actually needed. My legs gave way and I collapsed onto the forest floor. The pack was blurring at the edges, my eyes tunneling. But I couldn't turn my gaze away from Damian, couldn't help thinking that was the man that I did love. The man who'd wrapped me in his arms on thunderstorm nights because I was afraid of lightning. Who'd cooked soup for me when I was sick. Who'd told me I was beautiful every morning. He never glanced back at me, not even once. Dying, lying, the silver coursing through my body and the blackness encroaching, I could summon the courage to mind the one thing that still had meaning: "I am pregnant." I couldn't be sure whether or not he was listening. The wind was blowing through the trees so fiercely, my voice was hardly more than a whisper. But I had to try it; I had to make him see what it was that he was truly destroying, killing. "I'll return," I swore to the dark night sky, the shining moon that seemed to be watching all this horror. "I'll get you two for this. For me, and our baby." The last vision seared into my mind was that of the silver moon, light cold but beautiful. It was as though the Moon Goddess leaned against my ear and spoke softly a secret to me that this was not farewell. That I would have another chance, someway or somewhere. And then the shadows consumed me as Amy Silverclaw died in the forest, betrayed and abandoned, with a secret that would never be revealed. But death, it turned out, was not as permanent as they had made me think.