#CHAPTER 1 Return to the Wedding

“You’ll come to me tonight?” A sickly sweet feminine voice crooned.

“As soon as I can,” a second voice answered—my fiancé’s voice, “I’ll drug her if I have to. No one but you is getting this cock tonight.”

The room swam into focus, and I realized I was back at this exact moment from a year ago. Two hours before my wedding.

“Lucas,” the woman moaned.

I pulled back from the door like it had scalded me, yanking the veil from my hair.

He couldn’t.

He wouldn’t.

Lucas was my fated mate. I was destined to carry his cubs.

We were meant to rule together, side by side, as the Lycan King and Queen. I looked down at the veil clenched in my fingers, my vision blurred by tears. I threw the fabric to the ground.

A heavy, unexplainable fury began to rise in my gut.

How could this have happened? I should have been dead. But somehow… I was back. Back to one year ago.

I replayed the scenes of our marriage like a fool willingly drinking poison, even as it went sour on her tongue. Lucas, my fated mate and the heir to the Lycan King, had said his vows and pushed the ring on my finger with enough force to make me stumble backwards.

Quickly, Lucas stopped coming to our chambers, and his study door was always locked. I tirelessly worked to prove myself to him despite this coldness, that I could fulfill the roles of dutiful wife and consort to the future Lycan King.

I still believed he could learn to love me, even if I wasn’t his childhood sweetheart, beta Harper.

It wasn’t until later I discovered he had already ruled me out.

Harper crowded our marriage from the very start, like a stone in my shoe I could never kick away. She was there in the mornings, and she was there deep into the night, filling the castle with lewd sounds through the walls and keeping me awake.

I accepted everything, these evenings of infidelity, Ruby’s constant taunting of their relationship, the gifts and jewelry he gave her even when my own dresses began to come apart.

When I finally became pregnant, I truly believed he would return to me. He had to love me as the mother of his child, what more could I do to show him I was just as worthy of his affection as beta Harper?

Then, that fateful night, when Harper appeared in my doorway with a bottle of pills hidden in her coat, I at first thought she was there to apologize.

“May I come in?” She asked sweetly.

I tensed, uneasy. “If you must.”

”I only want to talk,” she said, “it’s been so long since we chatted as friends.”

She perched beside me on the bed, pressing her hand into my growing stomach. I tried to push her away but she pressed into my skin painfully. “Lucas’s child is getting big, isn’t it?”

“Our child, I think you mean. I am the mother after all.”

Harper grimaced at my words, and lifted her hand away from me. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to give birth. To increase the size of the pack. I’ve always hoped my cubs would have Lucas’s eyes.”

I startled back at her words, “What are you saying?”

She glared at me, grabbing me by the back of the throat and slamming me into the mattress. “Who do you think you are to get to carry his children? His mate? The one he can never love?” She cackled, pulling out the black pill bottle from her inner pocket. “You will die tonight, Ruby, and your baby will die with you.”

I thrashed against her, but her grip was too strong. She forced the entire bottle of pills down my throat and immediately my body began to shake. The blood came instantly, and the pain made me howl.

She ripped me off the sheets and onto the floor, pressing into my chest with her knees.

“You stupid bitch,” she hissed into my ear, dangerously quiet. Her fingers tightened around my hair, wrenching me up to look into her face. She grinned. “Lucas has used you from the beginning.

”What, did you think he wouldn’t take advantage of your parents’ connections to finally overthrow his brother Caleb? That he wouldn’t throw you away as soon as you were no longer useful?

“He loves me. He always has and he always will.”

A tall, shadowy figure appeared in the doorway. I recognized him instantly, and my heart desperately wanted to call out to him. “Well?” He rumbled, with the same voice that had sworn to love and protect me.

Harper snickered, dropping my head to the ground with a hideous sound. “We’re free,” she said, stepping on my wrists to meet Lucas.

He bent down to meet my eyes, tilting my chin to him as if he meant to kiss me, like I had dreamed of a thousand times since we first met. “I’ve wanted you dead since the day we married. Seeing you now, drenched in blood, this is the most beautiful you have ever been to me.”

I gurgled out a pathetic plea, desperate for his forgiveness, for his touch, for him to remember the binding agreement he made to me at the altar. Nothing but blood emerged from between my lips.

A horrific crash sounded from the staircase, followed by a series of screams.

“We need to go, the soldiers will be here any minute.” Lucas, the man I had thought was the love of my life, didn’t even spare me a second glance as I bled out on the floor.

They left me there, dying, as the chaos of invasion roared outside.

No one made it out alive, not even Harper and Lucas as the castle burned down, I heard as much from the shouting maids cowering in terror before the attackers. The flames swallowed the room and filled my lungs with ash.

I was too weak to breathe, the pills had drained the life out of me, and the blood loss was too much. I remember the light fading and being held in strong arms, Caleb’s face just above mine. Tears slipped from his nose to my cheeks, and the last thing I could recall was the sound of his voice, choking out my name.

Then suddenly I slipped out of his grip and the world tumbled away from me, like I had fallen into a cold, black abyss.

I slammed into the ground with a gasp, and my vision spun as the shapes around me fell into place.

And here I was again.

I had died. But that hadn’t been the end.  

How had I returned? Reborn to this exact moment? Something or someone brought me back from the dead, a year into my past, but for what reason?

I shoved open the doors, revealing the two of them in a tight embrace, Harper’s lips swollen and red. She smirked at me without shame. “Oh, the future queen.” She sighed, looking me up and down as if considering whether or not to eat me. “You look nice.”

Lucas pushed his hair back with his hand casually, as if I had only caught them talking.

“Ruby,” He said pleasantly, striding over to meet me. He wrapped a muscular arm around my waist, pulling me into him as if he meant to kiss me. I would have swooned in my past life, just being near him was enough to make me melt. “Are you ready to get married?”

I felt bile rising in my throat at the thought. Sharing a bed with this man, carrying his cubs, agreeing to his whims and suffering through the cruelty of our loveless marriage.

“Don’t touch me,” I said, my voice echoing in the hall like shattered glass. Lucas tensed, and I pushed his arm away, like he did mine in the wedding of my past life.

“Ruby, what’s wrong?” I glared into his face, the features I had come to know so well. “This isn’t like you.”

No, I wasn’t the same timid girl whose love he had taken for granted. I had a second chance, and I had no intention of wasting it.

“I’m calling off the wedding.”