THE LUNA REBORN

The Wedding I Don't Remember

The mirror showed a stranger in white.

Freya Ashwood stared at her own reflection—the same pale gold hair, the same gray eyes she'd had since birth—but the face looking back felt borrowed, like a costume she hadn't agreed to wear. Somewhere beneath the corset and the layers of silk, her heart was hammering out a rhythm that had nothing to do with excitement.

*You've done this before,* whispered a voice in the back of her mind. *You know how this ends.*

She didn't understand the thought. She'd never been married. She was nineteen, the daughter of a mid-ranked pack Beta, and today she was marrying Alpha Kane Draven of the Ashbourne pack—a merger arranged by their fathers, sealed by a ceremony older than either of their bloodlines. She should have felt lucky. Alphas like Kane didn't marry outside their own inner circles, let alone a girl from a pack half the size of his.

And yet.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw flashes that didn't belong to her: a moonlit hallway. A woman with black hair and knowing eyes. The taste of betrayal, sharp and metallic, like blood.

*Like blood.*

"Freya?" Her mother's voice cut through the spiral, gentle but urgent. "It's time."

Freya turned from the mirror and let her mother arrange the veil over her face, the delicate lace turning the room to gauze and shadow. Through it, everything looked like a memory already fading—which was strange, because it hadn't happened yet.

--- The ceremony took place in the Ashbourne pack's ancestral grove, beneath a canopy of black oaks strung with moonflowers that only bloomed once a year, and only for royal matings. Rows of wolves and humans alike—for the Ashbourne pack kept close ties with several human settlements—rose as she walked the aisle alone. Her father had died three winters ago; there was no one left to give her away.

She didn't mind. She'd never liked the tradition anyway, the idea that a woman was something to be handed from one man to another. That thought, too, felt oddly familiar, like a groove worn into her mind by repetition.

At the end of the aisle stood Kane.

He was, without question, the most striking man Freya had ever seen—tall enough that she had to tip her head back, black hair falling loose around a face carved from hard angles and old grief. His eyes were amber, wolf-bright even in his human form, and when they met hers, something in her chest twisted painfully, like a bone resetting.

*I know you,* she thought, absurdly. *I have always known you.*

Kane's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly as she approached. If she hadn't been searching his face so closely, she would have missed it—the flicker of something like pain crossing his features before he smoothed it into the practiced calm of an Alpha performing his duty.

"You look beautiful," he said, when she reached him, and his voice was low enough that only she could hear it. There was no warmth in it. Only a kind of exhausted formality, the tone of a man reciting lines he'd memorized long ago and stopped believing in.

*He rejected someone,* the thought surfaced again, unbidden, unexplainable. *Before me. There was someone else.*

She almost asked him. The words rose to her lips—*who was she, the one you didn't choose*—but the Elder had already begun the binding rites, and the moment passed like water through her fingers.

--- The binding ceremony was ancient and simple: a blade drawn shallow across each palm, blood mingled and sealed with a vow spoken beneath the full moon. When the Elder called for the exchange, Kane took Freya's hand, and the moment his skin touched hers, the world went white.

Not metaphorically. Actually white, blinding, total—and in that whiteness, Freya saw her.

A woman with hair like poured ink, standing in a hallway lit by torches. Kane—younger, softer around the eyes—reaching for her, murmuring words Freya couldn't hear. And then the same woman, later, older, her eyes gone flat and cold, a blade in her hand, moonlight sliding off the metal like water.

*He rejected our bond to save the pack. I loved him and he threw me away for a merger, for power, for you.*

*Now you'll die the way I should have.*

The vision snapped shut like a door slamming. Freya gasped, staggering, and Kane's hand tightened around hers—not gently. His eyes had gone wide, wolf-gold, startled.

"What did you just see?" he demanded, too quietly for anyone else to hear.

Freya's mouth had gone dry. "You know something," she whispered. "You know what's going to happen to me."

Something shuttered behind his eyes—guilt, maybe, or fear, or both. "Freya—"

"Alpha." The Elder's voice, sharp with warning, cut between them. "The rite is not complete."

Kane's gaze held Freya's a moment longer. Then, deliberately, he turned back to the Elder and finished the vow, his voice steady even as his hand trembled faintly around hers.

Freya said her own vows in a daze, the words coming out of her mouth without her permission, as though she'd spoken them a hundred times before in some other life, some other grove, beneath some other moon.

*This has happened before,* she realized, as the crowd erupted into cheers around them, as moonflower petals rained down from the black oaks. *I have stood here and said these words and died for them.*

*And no one is going to tell me why.*

That night, alone in the chambers that were now hers, Freya sat by the window and watched the moon climb over Ashbourne territory, and she made herself a promise.

Whatever had happened to her before—whoever she had been, however she had died—she would not walk blindly into it again. She would learn the truth about Kane Draven, about the woman with the ink-black hair, about the secret he was so clearly guarding behind that wall of amber-eyed silence.

She touched the raised scar on her palm, still warm from the binding blade, and for the first time since she'd woken that morning as someone's bride, Freya Ashwood allowed herself a small, private smile.

*Not this time.*

The Woman in the Portrait*

Freya didn't sleep.

She lay in the enormous bed that was now hers—too big, too cold on Kane's side, which remained pointedly empty—and stared at the ceiling until the sky outside began to gray with dawn. Every time she closed her eyes, the vision replayed itself: the hallway, the torches, the ink-haired woman with the blade.

*Now you'll die the way I should have.

By the time the sun properly rose, Freya had made a decision. She wasn't going to wait around for someone to explain her own death to her. She was going to find out who that woman was.

---

She started, as she suspected most secrets in a place like Ashbourne Manor started, with the servants.

An older woman named Marta ran the linen stores, and had, Freya learned within the first ten minutes of conversation, worked in the manor for over twenty years—long enough to remember Kane as a boy, long enough to remember whatever had happened before Frey