Chapter 3

Three Years Earlier

She woke up gasping.

Air burned her lungs as though she’d been pulled from deep water. Her heart hammered against her ribs, sweat clung to the back of her neck, and for one terrifying second she was certain she was still dying.

Her old room. The one from before she’d moved into the Alpha’s quarters.

Sera sat up slow, hands flat against the mattress like she needed to double check it was actually solid under her. The wallpaper was wrong  not wrong exactly, just old, the pattern she’d had stripped out years ago when Damian said the room needed updating. Except it wasn’t stripped out. It was right there, faded blue stripes, the same ones from when she was nineteen.

She looked down at herself.

No dress. No veil crushed against her scalp. Just a plain sleep shirt and her own hands pressed against her stomach, flat, completely flat, no curve to it at all.

“No.” She said it out loud, quiet, like saying it might make it less true. “No, no, no.”

She pressed harder, like the baby might just be hiding somehow, and there was nothing there. Nothing. Because there was nothing there yet. Relief and grief crashed into her all at once.

Her hands were shaking so bad she had to sit on them.

The memories were right there, all of it, sharp as if it had happened an hour ago instead of  instead of whenever this was. Cassandra’s laugh. Damian buttoning his shirt without a single flicker of guilt on his face. The trees tearing at her arms. The cold coming up off the forest floor. She could still feel that part, somehow, a phantom kind of cold in her chest that no blanket was going to fix.

She’d died. She knew she’d died. And now she was here, in a room she hadn’t slept in for years, with a body that had never been pregnant and skin with no mate mark on it at all.

Sera got up and went to the window with her legs not quite steady under her, and looked out at Crimson Moon Pack sitting there in the dark, whole and untouched, no idea what any of its people were about to do to each other.

She didn’t cry. She’d expected to, somehow, and instead what came was something colder and a lot more useful.

Never again.

She said it in her head first, then out loud, just to hear it land somewhere real. Never again was she going to stand in a room and not see what was right in front of her. Never again was she going to hand her whole life to someone because he said the right things at the right moments. Never again was some Omega going to hand her a glass of water and have her drink it without asking a single question first.

She didn’t know exactly how far back this was yet. Didn’t know how much time she had before the coronation, before the affair started, before any of it. But she knew one thing clean and simple, sitting in her chest like a stone: whatever came next, she was not walking the same path twice.

Breakfast the next morning was strange in a way she couldn’t quite name out loud.

Her  well. Not her staff yet, not officially, just the household she’d grown up half-adjacent to, people who used to fuss over her before she’d had actual authority to fuss over anyone else. Tessa was there, younger somehow, or maybe Sera was just seeing her different now, and she set a plate down in front of Sera without her usual chatter.

“You’ve been quiet,” Tessa said, after a minute of watching her not eat. “Quieter than usual, I mean.”

“I’m fine.”

“You keep saying that like it’s going to make it true.” Tessa sat down across from her, arms crossed, the same look she used to give Sera when she was sixteen and lying about something obvious. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Sera almost laughed at that. Almost.

“I had a strange dream,” she said instead, which wasn’t even a lie, not really. “It felt very real.”

“About what?”

About dying in the woods with your murderer’s voice as the last thing I heard. About my best friend’s face when she told me it didn’t matter how long the affair had gone on. About a baby I never got to name.

“Nothing important,” Sera said. “I’ll be all right.”

Tessa didn’t look convinced, but she let it go, the way she always did when Sera dug in on something. That was one thing at least that hadn’t changed  Tessa never pushed past a point Sera didn’t want pushed.

Sera picked at her food and thought, underneath all of it, about how much time she actually had. Three years, maybe. Give or take. Three years before that coronation, before the poisoned water, before she walked into that room and had her entire life pulled out from under her.

Three years.

One thousand and ninety-five days.

That was all fate was giving her.

This time, she intended to use every single one.

She just had to figure out where to start.

By the time breakfast was over, she’d already decided on the first thing  she wasn’t going to march up to Damian and accuse him of a crime he hadn’t committed yet. Wasn’t going to march up to Cassandra either, screaming about a version of events nobody else remembered happening. That would get her called mad, or worse, get her watched closer by exactly the people she needed to catch off guard.

No. She was going to be smarter than that this time.

She was going to watch. Quietly, carefully, the way she should have been watching all along the first time around  and whatever she found, whatever cracks she could see now that she knew exactly where to look, she was going to use every single one of them.

She believed she had been sent back to change her own future.

She had no idea fate had already begun rewriting everyone else’s.