Chapter 4

The First Crack

She started with small things. That was the plan, anyway  small, quiet, invisible things, nothing that would make anyone look at her twice.

She changed her morning walk first. In the life she remembered, she used to cut through the east garden on her way to the training yard, past the kitchens, past the well where the staff gathered to gossip before the day got going. This time she went the long way, past the stables instead, and told herself it didn’t mean anything, it was just a different path.

It wasn’t just a different path. She knew exactly whose window looked out over that garden.

“You’re taking the scenic route these days.” Rowan fell into step beside her on the third morning, hands shoved in his pockets, sandy hair doing whatever it wanted. He wasn’t Beta yet  wouldn’t be for another year, if she remembered right, still just one of Damian’s best fighters, the one everyone assumed would move up eventually. In her old life she’d barely spoken two words to him before he was standing at Damian’s shoulder in every meeting that mattered.

“Am I?”

“Stables aren’t exactly on the way to anywhere you usually go.” He said it easy, not suspicious, just making conversation the way he always did  she remembered that about him now, how he talked to everyone the same, whether they were an Alpha’s future mate or a stablehand mucking out a stall. “Figured you finally developed an interest in horses.”

“Maybe I did.”

“Sure.” He didn’t push it, just walked with her a while, commenting on nothing in particular  a fence that needed mending, a fight two warriors had gotten into over a card game the night before, whether the summer was going to be as dry as the elders kept predicting. Easy. Unbothered. Nothing like the version of him she remembered standing silent at Damian’s side while her whole life burned down around her.

She filed that away. Rowan noticed things. Rowan talked to everyone. Rowan might be worth knowing better this time, instead of walking past him for three years as though he were furniture.

She didn’t go looking for Cassandra that week. That was the hardest part, harder than she expected  years of habit didn’t just switch off because she knew what was coming. Her feet still wanted to carry her toward that room at the end of the east hall every time something good or bad happened, because that was where she used to take it, always, without thinking twice. She caught herself twice, halfway down a corridor before she remembered why she wasn’t supposed to be there anymore.

Instead she watched from a distance. Cassandra laughing with the other girls by the fountain. Cassandra “accidentally” seated near Damian at dinners that had nothing to do with her. Cassandra’s eyes finding him across a crowded room and holding a half-second too long before sliding away like it was nothing.

It had always been nothing, as far as Sera had known. She’d never once looked for it before, because why would you look for something you trusted completely.

She was looking now.

By the second week she had a small, ugly list forming in her head, nothing she could take to anyone, nothing that would hold up as proof of a single thing. A look. A seating arrangement. The way Cassandra’s laugh changed pitch slightly whenever Damian was in earshot, warmer, more careful, like she was performing for an audience of one. None of it was evidence. All of it made her stomach turn anyway.

Damian himself was harder to watch, because watching him meant being near him, and being near him still did something to her chest that she hated. Three years earlier than the wedding, he hadn’t looked at her twice yet  she wasn’t his mate in this stretch of time, wasn’t anyone particular to him at all, just the orphaned Voss heiress with land nobody quite knew what to do with. She used to think the day he first noticed her was the luckiest day of her life.

Now she watched him from across a hall and felt something closer to nausea.

“You’re staring,” Tessa said, low, elbowing her at a gathering she hadn’t even wanted to attend. “At the Alpha’s son. People notice that kind of thing, you know.”

“I wasn’t staring.”

“You were doing the thing where you stare and pretend you’re not staring, which is somehow worse.” Tessa followed her gaze anyway, over to where Damian stood laughing with a cluster of warriors, golden and easy and every bit as charming as Sera remembered from the very first days, before any of it went wrong. “He is something to look at, I’ll give you that.”

“He’s not worth it,” Sera said, before she could stop herself.

Tessa raised an eyebrow. “You’ve met him. Twice. Both times for about four minutes.”

“I know things.”

“You know things,” Tessa repeated, flat, clearly deciding not to fight her on it tonight. “Alright. Well. Keep your things to yourself where the wrong person can’t hear you say them like that.”

Sera let it go. She couldn’t exactly explain that she’d spent years married to the man, borne his child, and bled out in the woods on his orders  not without Tessa hauling her straight to the healer, and not without word of it eventually reaching people she couldn’t afford to reach yet. So she smiled instead, said something about being tired, and went back to watching from a safer distance.

By the third week, the future stopped behaving the way she remembered.

That terrified her more than Damian ever had.

She’d expected  hoped, really  that if she just kept her head down and changed nothing that mattered, the bigger shape of the future would stay roughly where she’d left it. Damian would still notice her eventually. The bond would still form on schedule, whatever schedule the Moon Goddess apparently worked on. She’d have time to gather what she needed before any of it truly started.

Instead, word came down from the capital that the Alpha King himself was riding out to Crimson Moon Pack.

She heard it the way everyone heard it  secondhand, breathless, half the household already in a panic about which linens needed changing and whether the kitchens had enough notice to prepare properly. Nobody explained why. Nobody needed to, not really; the Alpha King didn’t visit territories for pleasant conversation. He came when something needed looking into, and looking into meant somebody, somewhere, was in trouble.

Sera stood very still in the corridor when she heard the name, because in the life she remembered, the Alpha King was already dead by this point. Had been dead for almost two years, some illness that took him fast and quiet, no scandal to it, nothing anyone questioned at the time. She’d never met him. Damian had inherited authority over the pack years before that, young for it, everyone said, but nobody argued, because the old King’s illness left no other option and the succession had already been decided in his favor.

Except the old King wasn’t dead. Wasn’t even sick, as far as anyone in this hall seemed to know. He was riding out here, alive, in a timeline that wasn’t supposed to have him in it at all anymore.

She didn’t know what that meant yet. Didn’t know if it was something she’d caused, some ripple from all her small careful changes, or if it had always been this way and she simply hadn’t lived long enough the first time to see it happen differently. But she knew, standing there with her pulse picking up for no reason she could name out loud, that the map in her head  the one careful plan she’d built her whole survival around  had just torn itself down the middle.

Three years. She’d thought she had three years to work with, three years of knowing exactly what was coming before it came.

Three years.

She’d built every plan around those three years.

Around knowing exactly who would betray her…

exactly when…

exactly how.

Now fate had changed its mind.

And for the first time since waking up…

Sera was afraid.