Reborn On My Wedding Day

The cold came first.

Not the kind of cold you shake off with a blanket or a hot cup of tea. This was the kind that lived inside your bones, that turned your fingers into dead weight and your breath into something thin and useless. Claire Hayes pressed her back against the stone wall of the cell and listened to herself shiver.

The TV bolted above the bars flickered blue. She hadn't asked for it to be on. Nobody had asked her what she wanted in three years.

On the screen, the ballroom glittered. Crystal chandeliers. Women in red gowns. Men in tuxedos holding champagne flutes like they were born with them in their hands.

Derek stood at the center of it all.

He was wearing the blue tie she had picked for him on their honeymoon. He was laughing — that big, easy laugh she used to think meant he was happy. His arm was around Vanessa's waist. Vanessa, in a white gown that dipped low at the back, her dark hair pinned up with the diamond clip Claire had given her for her twenty-fifth birthday.

"To my Luna," Derek said, lifting his glass. "The woman who stood by me when everyone else walked away."

The ballroom applauded.

Claire watched the blood drip from her wrist onto the stone floor. She watched it pool in the crack between two old bricks, slow and dark and quiet. She pressed her palm flat to stop it, but her hand had gone numb twenty minutes ago.

She didn't cry. She had run out of that somewhere around month four.

On the TV, Vanessa tipped her face up to Derek and kissed him, and the crowd cheered louder, and Claire closed her eyes and thought about Ethan. Her brother, nineteen years old, with their mother's chin and their father's stubborn eyes. She hoped someone was feeding him. She hoped he hadn't come looking for her. She hoped he had moved far enough away that Derek's reach couldn't find him.

The cold crept higher. Past her knees. Into her chest.

She thought: I should have left him the first time he lied.

She thought: I should have run the night Vanessa smiled at him like that at the pack dinner.

She thought: I should have—

The cold reached her heart.

And everything stopped.

—

She gasped.

Air hit her lungs like cold water — clean, sharp, too much of it. Her hands flew out and grabbed the nearest solid thing, and her fingers closed around a fistful of white fabric. Silk. She looked down.

A bouquet. White peonies, trailing ribbon, trembling in her hands.

She looked up.

An aisle stretched ahead of her, lined with flowers and candles and three hundred faces turned in her direction, all of them smiling. Organ music swelled through the church, warm and full and wrong. So wrong. Her heart hammered against her ribs like it was trying to break out. Her dress — white, fitted, the corset laced so tight she could feel every breath — was exactly the dress she had worn once before.

Her wedding dress.

She was at her own wedding. Her first wedding. The one that had destroyed her.

At the altar, Derek stood with his hands clasped in front of him, watching her walk toward him. He was twenty years old and clean-shaven and he was smiling that smile — the one she had once thought was only for her. The one she now knew was a costume.

Beside him, standing in a pale rose bridesmaid gown with a bouquet of her own, was Vanessa. Her best friend. Her best friend who had already, by this point, kissed Derek behind the pack house twice. Claire knew that now. She hadn't known it then.

She knew it now.

She stopped walking.

Someone in the front row whispered. The music kept going for a few bars and then went uncertain, the organist losing her place.

Claire looked at Vanessa — at the way Vanessa's eyes flicked to Derek and then back, the tiny pleased twitch at the corner of her mouth — and felt something cold and clear replace the panic in her chest. Not rage. Not yet. Something quieter and more dangerous.

She looked away from the altar.

She scanned the pews. Friends. Pack elders. Derek's parents in the second row. Her father's empty seat where he would have sat if he were still alive.

And then — the last pew, left side, against the stone wall.

He sat alone.

Julian Thorne didn't belong at this wedding. He was North Ridge. He was Derek's enemy by blood and territory and a hundred old grudges. He was the man every pack whispered about and none of them wanted to cross. He was thirty-four years old, with a jaw like carved stone and dark eyes that had seen things Claire couldn't name, and he was watching her with an expression she had never seen on a man before.

Like he had been waiting.

Like he had always been waiting.

Claire's feet moved before her brain agreed to it.

She turned left. She walked past the front pews, past the gap in the aisle, past the startled face of Derek's mother and the confused murmur of the crowd. She walked the length of the church on legs that felt steadier with every step, her dress whispering against the stone floor, her grip on the bouquet tight enough to bruise.

She stopped in front of Julian Thorne.

He looked up at her. He didn't look surprised. He looked like a man watching something he had already known would happen.

Claire reached out with one hand, grabbed his tie — dark silk, loose at the knot — and pulled.

The church went absolutely silent.

"Marry me instead," she whispered.

For one second, Julian didn't move. He looked at her face — really looked, the way no one had looked at her in three years — and whatever he found there made something shift in his expression. Something old and locked and long-given-up.

He stood.

He was taller than she remembered. Broader. He took her face in both hands like she was something worth holding carefully, and he kissed her — not soft, not polite, not the kind of kiss that asks permission. The kind that states a fact.

The bouquet hit the floor.

When he pulled back, his eyes were black and his voice came out low and rough, meant only for her.

"I've waited ten years for you to say that."

Behind her, three hundred people erupted.