The Watcher In The Dark
856 Words
Isolde released my wrist and stalked off before I could ask her what she meant, leaving me standing alone under the stone archway with my heart pounding and her words echoing in my skull.
The last girl who tried to take what's mine.
In my first life, no other girl ever came between Isolde and Kade before me. I was the only obstacle she ever needed to remove. Unless, in this timeline, something had already happened that had never happened before. Unless my rebirth had shifted more than just my own fate.
I pushed off the archway and hurried after the shadow I saw slipping around the corner, following it through a narrow servant's passage that ran behind the training hall. My heart hammered with every step, half convinced I would find Alpha Damon Wolfe's spy, someone sent to report every conversation back to the man who orchestrated my entire first marriage.
Instead, I found Rowan.
My cousin leaned against the stone wall, arms crossed, his usual easy grin nowhere in sight.
"You heard all that," I said, breathless.
"Enough of it." Rowan's jaw was tight. "Selene, what is going on with you? First, you beg Dad to let you enrol here out of nowhere, then you're suddenly best friends with the Wolfe heir, and now the girl he's fated to marry is threatening you in a hallway. This isn't like you."
I opened my mouth to lie and found, for the first time since I woke up seventeen again, that I could not do it. Not to Rowan. Not to the one person in either of my lives who had never once betrayed me.
"I can't explain it," I said instead, which was at least half true. "But I need you to trust me. Something is wrong here, Rowan. Something bigger than pack politics. I think Isolde Marsh is dangerous, and I think the Wolfe pack wants something from our family that has nothing to do with love."
Rowan studied me for a long moment, the way he used to study puzzles as a child, turning them over and over until the pieces made sense.
"Alright," he said finally. "I trust you. But you're not doing this alone. Whatever it is."
Relief loosened something tight in my chest. In my first life, I walked into that marriage completely alone, with no one who understood the danger closing in around me. This time, I would not make that mistake.
The dinner bell rang somewhere across the courtyard, and Rowan peeled off toward the dining hall, promising to save me a seat. I lingered behind, needing a moment to breathe, to press my palms against the cool stone wall and steady myself before facing another meal full of careful smiles and hidden agendas.
"You're not eating."
I turned to find Kade standing a few feet away, watching me with an expression I could not quite place. Not the careful mask from the training field. Something softer. Something almost worried.
"I needed air," I said.
"Isolde found you." It was not a question. Of course he already knew. He probably always knew everything that happened around him, cataloguing threats the same way his father had trained him to since birth.
"She made herself clear," I said carefully.
Kade's jaw tightened. "I'm sorry. She can be... intense, when she feels threatened."
"Do I threaten her?"
He was quiet for a long moment, long enough that the courtyard lanterns flickered twice before he finally answered.
"I think you threaten everything I thought I understood about my own life," he said. "And I don't know what to do with that."
The honesty in his voice caught me completely off guard. This was not the man I married. That man never once admitted uncertainty, never once let me see anything beneath his careful control. This Kade, younger, unbroken, still capable of choosing a different path, looked at me like I was a question he actually wanted to answer.
For one dangerous second, I let myself imagine a version of this story where he chose me freely, where no father forced his hand, where no fated bond dragged him toward a woman who would one day kill me for getting in her way.
Then, a shout rang out from across the courtyard, sharp and urgent, cutting the moment in half.
A messenger came sprinting toward the dining hall, breathless, waving a sealed letter bearing the black wax stamp of the Wolfe pack.
"Urgent word from Alpha Damon," the messenger gasped, thrusting the letter toward Kade. "He's moved the alliance ceremony. He wants the match sealed before the full moon, not after."
The full moon was four days away.
I felt the blood drain from my face as Kade broke the seal, his expression shifting from confusion to something darker as he scanned the words.
"He's not talking about an alliance ceremony," Kade said slowly, looking up at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before, not once in seven years of marriage.
Fear.
"Selene," he said, "my father just announced our engagement to the entire pack council. Effective immediately."
- Writer
