COSIMA

Chapter 2: The Rejection

The candles hadn't burned down at all.

That was the first thing I understood, standing in the same great hall, in the same dress my mother had stitched over three months, my hands folded the same way they'd been folded when I died. The wax on the nearest candle sat at the exact height I remembered from before Melta opened his mouth. Serafina's mother hadn't finished her sentence yet. The air still smelled like pine smoke and roasted meat and perfume worn by women who had never needed to hide a bruise in their life.

I was back inside the moment that killed me.

My heart slammed against my ribs so hard I thought the whole hall must hear it, and for one long breath I understood nothing at all, not where I'd been, not what had reached into whatever came after dying and set me down again in my own body, three hundred wolves still watching, Melta still refusing to meet my eyes, his father still leaning toward him with that low, practiced murmur fathers use when they want a thing to look like their son's idea.

Then, all at once, I understood everything.

I remembered the ceiling beams carved with wolves, worn smooth by a hundred years of firelight. I remembered the cold taking my fingers first, then my feet, then the feeling in my own name. I remembered a voice that wasn't a voice at all, patient and ancient and faintly amused, telling me it would show me what I became when no one chose for me. And I understood, with a clarity that should have terrified me and instead settled into my chest like a blade finding its sheath, that I had been given the one thing no one is ever given twice.

I still had six seconds before he said it. I knew, because I had counted them the last time, uselessly, the way you count the seconds before a wave hits when you already know you can't outrun it.

"Say it now," Melta's father murmured, low enough that only our small circle should have heard, "before the Council arrives and it becomes harder to undo."

Last time, I had waited. I had stood there in my mother's dress with my hands folded like a woman waiting for a verdict, and I had let three hundred people watch him decide, out loud, in front of everyone who had ever doubted I deserved to be chosen at all, that I wasn't worth wanting. Something in me had simply stopped that night, quietly, the way a candle stops when there's no more air left to feed it.

This time, I would choose who got to be surprised.

"Melta."

My own voice startled me, steady in a way it had no right to be after everything my body had apparently just survived without my permission. He looked up, finally, gold hair catching the candlelight, that easy smile already arranging itself into whatever kind performance he'd rehearsed on the walk over here, and I watched confusion cross his face when he realized I had spoken before he had a chance to.

"I reject you."

The hall did not gasp so much as freeze, the way a held breath freezes right before it becomes a sound. Serafina's mother's mouth stayed open around whatever declaration of moon-given destiny she'd been about to finish. Somewhere to my left, I heard my own mother's sharp inhale, though I didn't turn to look at her. I couldn't. Not yet. Not while I still needed every ounce of my nerve pointed at the boy in front of me.

"As my mate." I made myself hold his eyes the entire time, because last time I had looked at the floor, at the door, anywhere but at him, and I would not make that mistake twice, not in this life or any other the moon decided to hand me. "As my future Luna's husband, as anything at all. I reject you, Melta, before you can finish embarrassing both of us with the pretense that this was ever going to work."

"Isolde." He said my name like it had betrayed him personally, which was almost funny, given everything he didn't yet know he owed me.

"Don't." My voice stayed level, cold in a way that surprised even me, and I felt something settle into place behind my ribs, exact and final, the last soft part of me closing like a door I intended to keep locked from now on. "Don't say my name like you have any right to be hurt by this. I'm not releasing you from anything, Melta. There's nothing gentle in this for either of us. I looked at you, really looked, for the first time in six years, and I decided you weren't worth keeping. That's all this is. That's all this was ever going to be."

His father's hand closed around his son's arm, some old instinct for damage control kicking in a beat too late to matter. "This is not how a rejection is properly announced. This requires the Council to witness a formal—"

"The Council can witness whatever it likes." I looked past him, at Serafina, whose composure had cracked exactly the half degree I remembered from the version of tonight that had killed me, her hand already reaching for Melta's arm out of old habit rather than any permission now that permission had been taken from her to give in the first place. "I'm not asking anyone's leave to reject something that was never going to deserve me."

Somewhere in the crowd, someone laughed, quickly smothered, exactly the way I remembered it happening the first time, except this time the laugh wasn't aimed at me.

The bond in my chest, the one that had torn itself apart and killed me the last time this exact moment happened, sat curiously still, almost sullen, like an animal that had been expecting a meal and been denied it. I waited for the pain, braced myself against the stone floor for the animal grief that had dropped me to my knees before, and instead felt only a cold, thorough satisfaction, the kind you feel setting a bone that has finally, mercifully, aligned correctly.

It didn't hurt.

It should have hurt. Rejection killed, everyone in that hall had been raised to believe that without question, and I had just handed one out with my own mouth instead of receiving it, and my heart kept beating anyway, steady, almost bored, like it had already done this dying once and had absolutely no intention of repeating the performance for an encore.

Melta's face had gone the color of old ash. "You can't reject me. I'm the one who's supposed to—"

"You're the one who what?" I tilted my head, watching him search for the end of a sentence he had never once, in his entire golden life, needed to finish before. "Say it, Melta. Everyone's listening. They were listening a moment ago when you were the one about to say it."

He didn't say it. He couldn't, not with his father's grip tightening hard enough now to leave a mark, not with Serafina's face doing complicated, frantic arithmetic beside him, not with three hundred witnesses waiting breathlessly to see which one of us would blink first in a game only I understood the rules to, because only I remembered playing it before.

I turned before he found his voice, before his father could recover his footing, before Serafina's smile had time to rebuild itself into something presentable. My mother stood near the back of the crowd, one hand pressed hard against her mouth, and she was not weeping, not this time, simply staring at a daughter who had walked into that hall as one girl and was clearly walking out as somebody else entirely.

At the door, I allowed myself one glance back, the same glance I remembered giving him the last time, except this time he was the one still standing in the wreckage, still searching the floor for an escape route that didn't exist.

"Find someone else to reject next time," I told him. "I already used mine."

I walked out into a night that hadn't happened yet the last time I lived through this evening, cool air against my skin, my heart intact, my collarbone bare of any scar, because nothing had torn through it this time to leave one behind.

Behind me, the hall finally found its voice, and it was not kind, and I found, walking down the stone path away from the only home I had ever known, that I did not care in the slightest.

Because somewhere behind that door, in a hut that smelled of oil and dried herbs, no pyre was waiting for me this time, no shroud, no dawn burning of a girl who had simply stopped existing out of grief.

And somewhere far beyond that pack's borders, in a court I had never seen and a hall I had never entered, a man I hadn't met yet, one the last version of my life had never lived long enough to reach, was about to become the only person who would ever know exactly how much it had cost me to walk out of that hall smiling.