Next Time, You Die
CHAPTER 1
Next Time, You Die
The first thing Ellara felt when the Veyr royal sword entered her chest was cold.
The blade drove through the black sigil carved into the center of the altar and then through her body. Silver met blood. Agony exploded along her ribs, and the widening gate of the dead convulsed beneath her feet.
Blue fire burned around the Hollowbone Church. Voices rose from beneath the earth—weeping, screaming, praying—until all of them dissolved into the call of a small child.
“Mommy.”
Ellara jerked her head up. It was Liora’s voice.
Her three-year-old daughter was dead. All Ellara had found beneath the altar was a bloodstained silver moon bell and half of a torn little dress. Ronan had promised he would bring their child back. In the end, he had returned with only four words.
It was already too late. Now he stood before her with both hands wrapped around the sword buried through her chest.
She could not see his expression clearly. Blood slipped from the corner of her mouth and fell across the wolf crest of House Veyr. Once, she had traced that crest with her fingertips. Once, she had rested against Ronan’s chest while he told her the blade would only ever be drawn to protect his family. And she had believed him.
“Why?”
Ronan did not answer. He stepped closer, as though he meant to catch her.
Ellara seized his wrist and forced herself to remain standing. The familiar heat of his skin dragged old memories to the surface: the rain over Grayharbor, the blood-soaked stranger in the alley behind her clinic, the silver wound in his side that refused to heal, and the restrained breath between them before their first kiss.
Back then, Ronan had been lying on her bed, black hair damp with cold sweat. She had stitched his wound while he watched her without blinking.
“You’re not afraid of me?” he had asked.
“You can’t even stand.”
“I could still kill you.”
Ellara had cut the final stitch and looked up at him. “Then wait until I finish the bandage. Otherwise, after you kill me, you’ll bleed to death here too.” A faint smile had touched his mouth.
Later, that smile had become a kiss. He had paused first, giving her room to pull away. Instead, she had caught his collar and closed the distance herself.
There had been no promises that night. Only wounds, heat, and breath turning steadily more desperate. She had believed a man who stopped before touching her—who waited for her choice—could never truly hurt her. She had been wrong about that too.
They had fallen in love. She had followed him into Blackpine Territory and become his mate despite the hatred of the wolf clans. When she became pregnant, Ronan had rested his palm over her still-flat stomach and said nothing for a very long time.
When Liora was born, all the werewolves in Moonkeep had bowed their heads at the sound of her cry. The child carried Veyr royal blood, a human soul, and a vampire bloodline. From the moment she opened her eyes, she had belonged completely to no race at all. Ronan had loved his daughter.
He had carried Liora through the corridors late at night and let her bite his finger with her tiny teeth. When she first called him Papa, he had stood alone on the terrace until dawn.
But when the elders began calling her a contamination, when someone took Liora from Moonkeep, when Ellara fell to her knees in the council hall and demanded that Ronan seal the borders immediately—he had still chosen to steady the pack first. Later, their daughter died in the Hollowbone Church.
Everyone told Ellara that Julian was dead too. Her mother, Helena, had been burned alive in their home. Her father, Gideon, became the target of Ronan’s hunt. Only after Ellara was locked beneath Moonkeep did she learn that Ronan’s first approach had never been an accident.
“You knew my father before you met me?” she had asked through the iron bars.
Ronan placed a blackened family crest on the floor between them. It had belonged to his first mate, Maeve.
“Fourteen years ago, vampires attacked Moonkeep. Maeve, Orin, and most of House Veyr were killed.”
“What does that have to do with my father?”
“He led them.”
Ellara had refused to believe it. The father who repaired her jewelry, kept watch beside her bed when she was ill, and cooked every birthday dinner with his own hands could not have murdered another woman and a five-year-old boy.
“So you came near me because you were investigating him?”
Ronan had been silent for a moment.
“At first, yes.”
Four words had ruined every tender memory between them. And still she had asked, “What about later?”
“Later, it wasn’t only because of him.”
She had cried over that answer. Only now, at the edge of death, did Ellara understand that as long as someone still wanted to keep loving, even the vaguest answer could be mistaken for hope.
The pain in her chest sharpened. Black lines of poison crawled beneath her skin toward her throat. Ronan seemed to notice at last. He tore the sword free, caught her against him, and pressed his palm hard over the wound.
“Look at me.”
“You always think everyone will obey you.”
“Ellara, that sword wasn’t meant to kill you. There was something in the ritual—”
A woman laughed somewhere deep inside the church. The sound vanished beneath the howling dead before Ellara could hear the rest. She knew only that the sword belonged to Ronan, and Ronan had been the one holding it.
“Where is Liora?”
His hand went still.
“I’ll find what remains of her.”
“She’s dead.”
“I know.”
“You always know everything,” Ellara whispered, “and you are always too late.”
The roof began to collapse. Broken stone fell into the fire. Ronan held her tighter, as though he could still steal a few more moments from the blood leaving her body. Ellara looked at the face she had loved for years and remembered the night they met in the rain.
If she had shut the clinic door and left him to die in that alley, there would have been no Moonkeep. No mating bond. No marriage. No Liora.
“If I could live it again…” Her voice broke. “I wouldn’t save you.”
“Don’t speak.”
“I wouldn’t love you. I wouldn’t give birth to our child.”
At last, something cracked in Ronan’s expression. With the last of her strength, Ellara caught his collar and pulled him close, exactly as she had before their first kiss. This time, she did not kiss him.
“Next time,” she breathed, “you die.”
Darkness swallowed the church. When Ellara opened her eyes again, birds were singing beyond the window. Sunlight spilled through white curtains and stretched across a wooden floor. There was no smell of blood, grave poison, or scorched stone.
She was lying in the bedroom that had been hers at twenty-three. Julian’s forgotten sheet music sat on the bedside table. The pale gray coat she meant to wear to the clinic hung over the back of a chair.
The skin over her chest was unbroken. Her heart was pounding so violently it hurt. Her mother’s voice came from the hall.
“Ellara? Are you awake? Breakfast is getting cold.”
She threw herself out of bed and yanked open the door.
Helena stood in the corridor holding a stack of freshly folded towels. Her hair had not burned away. There was no blood on her face, no trace of how she had looked before she died.
When Ellara flung her arms around her, Helena stumbled back half a step in surprise.
“What is it? Did you have a nightmare?”
Julian called from downstairs, “If she doesn’t come down now, I’m eating all the pancakes.” Ellara released her mother and nearly ran into the dining room. Her nineteen-year-old brother sat at the table with food still in his mouth. The moment he saw the tears on her face, his expression turned strange.
“Did you see a ghost?”
She wrapped her arms around him and did not answer.
Gideon came out of the kitchen in a crisp white shirt, his expression as gentle as she remembered. He set down a cup of coffee and touched the back of his hand to her forehead.
“You look pale. Do you have a fever?”
He smelled faintly of medicinal herbs. In her first life, Ronan had told her that the people who killed Maeve and Orin carried that same scent. Ellara looked at her father and did not step away.
She still did not know the truth of the massacre. She could not know how much Ronan had hidden from her. But one thing was certain. Her family was still whole. She turned toward the calendar on the wall. April twelfth.
Three days from now, rain would fall over Grayharbor through the entire night. She would find Ronan wounded in the alley behind the clinic. She would open that door for him—and from that moment on, lose everything she possessed.
This time, she would not enter the alley. If he still appeared before her, she would not stop his bleeding. Before she ever fell in love with Ronan, she would discover who had killed Liora.
And if the answer was still him—she would take the revenge she had failed to claim in her first life.
