The Alpha's Unwilling Mate

The hollow Mirror

Chapter 11: The Hollow Mirror

POV: Lyra Vale

My heart was hammering the whole walk to the east wing. Every step on the stone floor felt loud, final. I had pushed her. I had watched the silver light fade from the sacred water and did nothing while she went under.

But the warriors had found her. They brought her back. And now she was sitting in her room eating fruit and trying on dresses.

I stopped outside the oak door. My palms were wet. The guilt sat heavy in my chest, but underneath it the jealousy was still there, still burning the way it always had. Kael should have been mine. We were the same kind of fire. Selene had always been something cooler, something that didn't match him.

I smoothed my hair, pressed a smile onto my face, and pushed the door open.

"Selene?" My voice came out thin. "It's me. I couldn't stay away any longer."

She was sitting by the window in the late afternoon light. When she turned to look at me, I tensed, waiting for the fear to cross her face, for the accusation, for the recoil of a woman who remembered my hands on her shoulders.

She smiled instead.

It's warm and easy, and nothing is submissive in it. "Lyra. Elara told me you'd been asking after me. Come in."

I walked into the room. My wolf's hackles went up immediately. The lavender was there, but the air around her felt different. Like static before a storm.

"I've been so worried," I said, reaching for her hands. They were warm. Too warm for someone who had been pulled out of a freezing river. "When you slipped, I thought I'd lost you."

"I'm sorry I scared you," she said, squeezing my fingers. I'm not clinging. Just steady. "I'm still piecing things together. The river took more than my breath. It took most of my memories with it."

"The memory loss," I said, studying her eyes. They were clear and focused and completely empty of the soft, wounded look she usually wore around me. "You truly don't remember the walk? The argument?"

"The fog is thick. I remember your name, and I know we're close, but the rest is just shadows and water." She let go of my hands and sat back, crossing one leg over the other.

My wolf went rigid.

Selene never sat like that.

For twenty years, I had watched Selene arrange herself carefully around other people. She always tilted slightly away, kept her hands folded, and made herself smaller when dominant wolves were in the room. It was just how she was built, always softening her edges so no one felt challenged.

This woman sat square. Chest open, chin level, spine straight, taking up the full space of her chair like she had every right to it. It wasn't a performance. It was just how she was sitting. Like the concept of making herself small had never occurred to her.

"You're very calm," I said. My voice shook slightly. I sat down across from her and caught myself hunching the way I always had around Selene, which made no sense because Selene had never once made me feel small. "Usually, you'd be in tears. You'd be asking for Kael."

"Maybe the river washed the tears out," she said with a short, dry laugh. "I don't feel like crying, Lyra. I feel like I have a kingdom to learn and not much time. You'll help me, won't you? You know me better than anyone."

"Of course," I said.

It was a lie, and I think we both knew it.

The more she spoke, the higher the panic climbed in my throat. The words were friendly. The tone was right. But the frequency underneath all of it was wrong. This wasn't the girl I had shoved off that bank. This was something wearing her face, moving through her body, looking out through her eyes. The reflection was correct, but the depth behind it was different.

"You seem so different," I said, the words coming out before I could stop them. "The way you move. It's like you're a stranger in your own skin."

"I am a stranger in my own skin," she said, holding my gaze without any effort at all. "That's exactly what I've been trying to say. I'm starting from the beginning. But I'm still Selene. Who else would I be?"

She was watching me. I could feel it. Testing my reaction to everything she said and did. But if she remembered the shove, if she knew what I had done, why was she sitting here being warm and calm instead of calling the guards?

"You just need rest," I said quietly. "The coronation is a lot of pressure."

"I'll be fine," she said, and the certainty in her voice sat in the room like something solid. "I'm a survivor. I think I always have been. I just didn't know it until I hit the bottom."

I stayed another ten minutes. We talked about dresses and guest arrangements and I don't remember a word of it because my wolf was pacing the whole time, whining low, telling me there was a predator in the room that looked like something safe.

When I finally left I walked fast, then faster, until I was out in the courtyard breathing air that didn't smell like lavender and ozone and whatever that foreign charge was that clung to her skin now.

I stood there with my hands on my knees.

I hadn't failed to kill her. I had done something worse. Whatever came out of that river was not the girl who had spent ten years looking at Kael like he was the answer to every question she had. It moved like it owned the ground under its feet. It held eye contact without thinking about it. It laughed dry and short, and nothing about it reached for approval.

If it wasn't Selen, then the real Selene was still somewhere in that water. Or somewhere worse.

I couldn't go to Kael. He would read the guilt off me before I got a sentence out. I couldn't go to Riven. He was already looking too closely at everything.

I needed someone who understood the Virel bloodline from the inside. Someone who knew the old texts, the dark edges of what the river could actually do, the things the Elders had stopped teaching out loud. Someone who had always cared more about the power of that bloodline than about the palace politics surrounding it.

Eryndor.

Selene's uncle lived far out in the western reaches, well outside the Alpha's regular reach. He had always been obsessed with Luna's role, the spiritual anchor, the deeper mechanics of what the Virel line actually carried. If a soul had been moved through that river, he would know. And if there was a way to pull the truth out before the coronation locked everything in place, he was the only person who could find it.

I looked back at the palace. Silver banners moved in the wind above the high windows.

I'm sorry, Selene, I thought. But I won't let something else wear your face and take what was never even yours to begin with.

I turned toward the stables.

Two days before the coronation. Two days to find out what the river had actually done and whether it could be undone before the Silver Moon bound itself to a stranger wearing its queen's skin.

I had to get to Eryndor.

Before the King figured out his bride was hollow.