"Happy wedding day, Mia," Kade whispered against my ear, and for one more second I let myself believe I was the luckiest omega in Valemoor.
Then he drove the knife into my side.
Pain exploded through me, hot and impossible. For one heartbeat my mind refused what my eyes were seeing — the blade buried to the hilt, blood blooming dark across my white gown, Kade Ashford's face still tipped close to mine like he meant to kiss me instead.
"Kade?" My voice came out small. "What—"
The pack quartet's strings shrieked into silence. Somewhere behind me a champagne glass shattered against marble. Sofia, my bridesmaid, screamed his name and lunged for me — and one of the groomsmen caught her by the throat and slammed her into the head table like she weighed nothing. Not a man's strength. A wolf wearing a man's suit.
Nobody else moved. My mother stood near the front, close enough that I could see her hands — clasped so tightly around her clutch that her knuckles had gone white, her whole body trembling like she was holding something back by force. She didn't look away from me. She also didn't move. I would spend whatever life I had left trying to decide which of those two facts hurt worse.
"Why," I begged, gripping Kade's wrist, my hand slipping in my own blood. "You're my mate. You're supposed to—"
"That's exactly why," he said.
He didn't sound like the Alpha who'd run Ashford Enterprises with a raised eyebrow and a lowered voice. He sounded like the man underneath that — the one who used to trace circles on my wrist during council meetings just to watch me try not to smile.
"Because I loved you," he said. "That's exactly why you have to die."
His face gave away nothing else. No tears, no tremor, no hand hovering over the hilt like he might reconsider. Just those two sentences, spoken with the same calm he used to end a boardroom argument, and I understood in that moment I would never know which one of them had been the lie.
My knees buckled. I caught the head table on the way down, smearing red across white linen, and that's when the pendant at his throat pulsed once, bright as struck flint — the same black stone in its silver claw setting he'd worn every day I'd known him, the one I'd once asked about and watched him change the subject instead of answering. His eyes went gold, then black, no wolf left in them at all, no man either. Whatever knelt in front of me still had his hands, his voice, the small scar above his left eyebrow from a training accident he'd told me about on our second date. None of it belonged to him anymore.
Past the ballroom doors, chanting rose to meet that light, low and rhythmic in a tongue I didn't know, and cut off dead the second the glow in his eyes died.
And the room stopped.
Not quiet. Stopped. A champagne glass hung sideways in the air, its contents frozen mid-splash. Sofia's scream still hung open on her face. An orchid petal hovered an inch above the floor, refusing to finish falling.
Only I could still move. Only I was still bleeding in real time, still cooling, surrounded by two hundred people who could see exactly what was happening to me and had, every one of them, already decided not to help.
"What are you?" I whispered, and burned the pendant into memory — silver claws, black stone, a symbol I didn't recognize and would never forget.
Kade's face had gone still and careful, the way an Alpha's face goes when he's had a great deal of practice putting it there in front of a pack that needs him steady.
"You're not supposed to remember any of this," he said. "None of them will."
"Kade, please—"
"Goodbye, Mia."
He said my name the way you say a word you've buried in a hundred other graves, and gotten good at the burying.
The last thing I saw was that pendant, small and ugly and glowing faintly gold at its center, as the ballroom shrank to a pinprick around it — the candlelight, the crushed orchids, the low animal hush of a pack that had all, somehow, agreed to let this happen.
Love got me killed once, I thought, fury cutting cleaner than the fear ever could. Curiosity is going to have to keep me alive.
Then nothing. No ballroom, no pack, no Kade. Dark so complete it didn't feel like dying. It felt like being erased.
"Mia, honey, you're going to be late!"
My mother's voice. Warm sunlight instead of candle flame. A kettle whistling somewhere close, ordinary and small and alive.
My eyes flew open onto a cracked ceiling I hadn't seen in years — cracked in the exact shape I remembered from being restless and twenty-one, lying awake wondering what kind of mate the pack elders would eventually choose for me.
I sat up too fast, hand flying to my side, searching for the wound. Nothing. Smooth skin. No trace of silver, no ache where a blade had opened me to the bone.
My phone sat on the nightstand exactly where it used to live. I grabbed it, thumb shaking, and swiped up.
Three years before my wedding.
I sat with that number a long moment, feeling the shape of everything it meant without letting myself chase it all the way down yet.
I was alive. I was twenty-one. And I remembered every second of the night my mate killed me — the smell of crushed orchids and old magic, the sound of a pack choosing silence, my mother's hands shaking around a clutch purse while she stood perfectly, deliberately still.
I thought I'd remembered everything about that night already. But sitting here now, three years early, one small detail surfaced that I hadn't let myself look at directly until this exact moment: my mother's eyes hadn't been on Kade when the knife went in. They'd been on the pendant. Like she already knew what it would do the instant it lit — and was only waiting to see if it would.
He'd said he loved me. He'd said that was exactly why.
I didn't know yet which version of Kade Ashford I'd meet again first. But I knew, with total, cold certainty, that somebody in that ballroom had known exactly what was going to happen to me before it ever did.
I just hadn't let myself ask, until right now, whether that somebody had been my own mother.