UNPLANNED REBIRTH: MARRIED TO MY STEPSON

I die with my eyes open. The flames are greedy—they climb like hands, like teeth, like the laughter I learned to swallow. Wood pops under my knees and the iron biting my wrists has gone red, then black, then sullen again. Smoke claws my throat, and the crowd’s hum folds into one low, unending note. I breathe it in because there is nothing else left to take. Someone screams my name. The sound evaporates in the heat. Blood slicks my forearms where the rope burned through skin. It slips in thin ribbons over my fingers, pooling along the ridge of my knuckles before dripping to the kindling below. In the firelight my blood gleams—a silver sheen threaded through red, too bright, too wrong. Gasps ripple outward. Shock breaks the note. “Moon-marked.” A hiss. A curse. Fear sharpened to edge. No one says chosen. Not here. Not now. Not while the pyre feasts. I do not look up at the dais, at the man who sent me here. I do not look at the iron crown of scars along the Alpha’s jaw or the lazy curl of his wine-glossed mouth. Malrik Ravaryn sits like a statue carved from arrogance, rings flashing as he toys with a goblet. Beyond the smoke, his gaze is bored. My death is not the first he has scheduled today. I lift my head anyway, not to him but to the other figure standing at his right hand. Kael Ravaryn does not sit. He stands as if the dais is a roof beam he alone supports, still as winter and just as merciless. He wears no crown. He doesn’t need one. The crowd watches him more than his father. They fear him more, too, though they pretend they don’t. It’s almost funny, the way laughter is funny while you drown. The smoke strips him of color; he could be carved from shadow. But those eyes… even from the pit I can see how they cut. I never believed stories about them, not really—about how a glance from the young Alpha could peel you down to truth. In this moment, with fire washing the world into molten white, I believe. For the first and last time in this life, I believe. He watches me as the flames climb higher. He does not gloat. He does not turn away. Indifference lives in him the way heat lives in coals—constant, patient, waiting for air. “Confess,” someone shouts. “Beg.” I bare my teeth. Not a smile. Not surrender. Something older. My tongue tastes of ash. My mouth tastes of iron. I swallow it all and hold his gaze—Kael, breaker of packs, heir to a throne soaked through—until the heat bores through my sternum like a spear. The world wavers. The crowd dissolves into floating motes of soot. Silver flickers again—my blood striking the wood like falling stars. It should matter. It should change everything. The old rites whisper that silver-born blood is a sign of the Moon’s claim, a blessing given to very few. I kept that secret as if it were a rib around my heart. I had no prophecy, no banner, no shining path—only this small defiance, this shimmer in the dark. It is all the goddess ever gave me that was truly mine. And now they see it. Now they see me. Now, at the end. Kael’s head tilts, fractional, as if something he didn’t expect has brushed the edge of his perception. One of the guards—Dorian Vale, with his impassive face and careful eyes—steps half-forward, then stills at a flick of Malrik’s hand. The tyrant prefers the lesson complete. Heat roars up my spine and turns my body to a single, bright chamber of pain. I kneel because I have no choice. The ropes sing like meat. My vision tightens to a pin. I think of being sold like a trinket to this pack. I think of all the times a hand touched my face without permission. I think of the nights I stared at the ceiling and wondered who I might have been if the world had left me alone. I think of his son—the man above who never looked my way unless the moment required it—and how he led the wolves who broke my last refuge, how he drowned my name in blood. I think: if I had met him first, if I had made him see me on my terms—would the story have turned? The pain cresting inside me says there is no answer. I exhale. There is no fear now, not really. Only the final smallness of being who I am, and knowing it mattered only to me. “Selene Duskbane,” I tell the flames, because no one else will say my name like a promise. “Remember me.” Silver spills, and the world goes quiet. — I awaken with a scream trapped behind my teeth. My lungs suck cold air as if it were water, as if I’ve broken through ice. The room is dark and familiar. The ceiling beams are low and knotted; the window’s latch clicks in the winter wind. Behind the walls, the old house groans like it remembers too much. The pyre is gone. The ropes are gone. Smoke loosens its hands around my throat. I lie panting, heart beating a strange, doubled rhythm—like two heartbeats taking turns. For a moment the two lives lay one atop the other, thin paper held against sunlight. The edges don’t match, then they do. This room. This bed. The threadbare quilt with its tiny, stubborn peonies stitched by a mother who was already halfway gone. The cold night spilling through the crack in the shutters. The smell of beeswax and woodsmoke and… birthday cake, flickering downstairs. Eighteenth. A date that once meant nothing but a different set of chores. A date that in the other life marked the beginning of the end. The night my father—rendered small by debts and fear—made a bargain that sold his daughter for safety. The night I learned the sharp price of being born to a crumbling legacy. I sit up. My hands shake. When I lift them to my face, moonlight catches on my skin. A fine, silvery thread runs along the cut at the base of my thumb. I press it. The smallest globule swells—pale as mercury, bright as a promise, then blurs back into red. My heart trips over itself. The goddess did not change her mind. The mark is still mine. I slide out of bed and cross to the washbasin. The mirror there is old and spotted, but it offers back the girl I remember with an intimacy so sharp it hurts. Hair black as raven wings, the color inherited from a line that once meant something. Eyes like winter water, steady when they want to be, sharp when they choose. I touch my throat without knowing why. In another timeline, a rope scorched me there and left a welt shaped like a handprint. My skin here is smooth. This is not a dream. Dreams do not carry the weight of ropes or the sharp memory of heat. Dreams do not know the exact slant of Kael Ravaryn’s gaze as flames reached for me. My stomach turns, but I let the memory stand. I let it haunt. It is a blade I will need. Downstairs, a muffled toast. Someone sings off-key. My father’s voice never rises above the rest; he used to be a man who filled a room without opening his mouth. Now he folds, always, small enough to slip past greed without being seen. In a handful of days—hours, perhaps—men in dark coats will arrive at our door carrying the scent of old money and new threat. They will bring a contract. They will speak of opportunities and peace and protection. He will believe. He will sign. And I will be packed like cargo for Malrik Ravaryn’s house. Not this time. I dress as the house breathes around me. The clothes are simple—the good dark dress mended at the hem, the wool cloak I stole from the laundry years ago. Boots that fit if I pretend. Fingers find the knife hidden in the seam of the trunk. The steel is a little dull; it will do. I tuck it into the sheath stitched to the inside of the cloak. Familiar weight. I pause at the window. The village crouches beyond, roofs hunched, chimneys seaming the sky with tired smoke. Beyond the last fence, the forest waits, shadow pooled under shadow, the trees watching each other daring not to move. Past that, the world. Packs that stay to themselves and packs that devour. Borders drawn on maps and redrawn with teeth. The Ravaryn lands lie to the east, just beyond the river’s bend, a dark sprawl of power wrapped in winter fog. I should run the other way. I should gather my name and vanish into a town no one cares for, learn to be a ghost that breathes. But the vision of flames does not let my back turn. The future is a mouth I have already seen, and going anywhere else is still walking toward it with my eyes closed. The only path is through the choke point that destroyed me. “Kael,” I say into the glass, and the word fogs and fades. The name tastes like iron on my tongue. The young Alpha. Ambition shaped into a man. Lover of nothing but victory, worshiper at the altar of his own will. The son who waits like a knife his father forged but cannot control. I never met him before that day. By then, narrative had already chosen its ending. Not this time. I am not brave. Not noble. Not any of the soft words tales prefer. I am alert. I am furious. I am alive. And I know the order of things matters. First impressions are the first myths. If I want my name to survive the mouths it passes through, I must place it there myself. I leave my room as quietly as I learned to breathe around secrets. The stairs ache. The hall smells of wax and stew, and the old runner sighs under my feet. On the landing, voices tremble with drunk warmth. My father laughs, thin and eager. It makes my teeth ache. I do not go down. In the side room—once my mother’s sewing room, now a graveyard for broken furniture—I kneel and pry up the loose floorboard in the corner. Beneath it: a small leather pouch, coins, papers that mean little. My hand shakes again. I take half. Leave the rest. I am not generous; I am practical. He will need something to think he still has a plan. I replace the board, press it into place, stand. The moon is kind enough to path the hall in pale. She always did that—witness without intervention. Perhaps that is all gods do. Perhaps I would do the same in her place, watching a girl hunt for her place in a world with no room. At the back door, the latch sticks. It always has. I curse under my breath and press with the base of my palm until it slides. Winter finds me in the courtyard and licks my cheeks with cold. I cross to the low wall and vault it like a stray, landing in the weeds. In the far field, a fox lifts its head and considers me, then flicks away. The sky wears tatters of cloud like old wool. Everything here is honest in its smallness. Everything here would strangle me kindly if I let it. I shoulder my cloak and start walking. The woods accept me because I have always walked them alone. The path I choose snakes toward the river rather than away. At its end, the Ravaryn border cuts through the world like a line someone dared the sky to cross. Patrols. Rumors. Teeth. My breath feathers. My legs remember how to move without sound. It takes longer than I plan and shorter than a lifetime. Thoughts ebb and surge. Occasionally a memory grabs my ankle—Malrik’s sloppy smile, Dorian’s careful, weary eyes, Kael’s attention pinning me to a fate hotter than the flames that licked my bones. I don’t realize I’ve reached the river until I hear it—black water gnawing quietly at its banks, a sound like cloth tearing in slow motion. It is wider than it was the last time I stood here. The current drags, silvery under the moon. I crouch among the reeds and stare at the opposite bank. There are lanterns there, spaced at rigid intervals. The Ravaryn way, efficient even in its threats. A fence kisses the waterline. Beyond it, forest, thick and black. My plan is more instinct than architecture. I do not intend to march into Malrik’s court and offer my neck. I intend to find the fractures, the quiet corridors that run under the throne. I intend to put myself in front of Kael Ravaryn before anyone can tell him what to think of me. I intend to make my name in his head before he can strip it from his tongue. If fate wants to play with silver threads, I will pull one of my own. Somewhere far behind me, in a house that forgot its pride, a father pours another drink and tells strangers how brave his daughter is. I roll my sleeves and test the river’s bite with my hand. It is teeth and winter and memory. I hiss, then laugh, then grit my teeth. “Remember me,” I whisper again—not to flames this time, but to dark water and cold air. “Remember what I do next.” I plunge in up to the knee, then the hip, then the ribs. The current tries to drag me south toward drowned things and easy ends. I aim east. Halfway across, my breath snags on something that isn’t cold. A sensation threads through me, fast and bright and electric as if the moon had plucked a string inside my chest. It isn’t pain; it isn’t comfort. It feels like recognition without memory, a door unlocking a room I didn’t know I had. For a heartbeat my vision whites out. My fingers cramp. My skin prickles as if brushed by lightning that chose not to kill. It fades. I am left gasping and clinging to a root with my fingers gone numb. I stare at my hand. My palm glows briefly where the knife hilt presses, then it is only skin again. The river moans. The lantern on the opposite bank flares and settles. I look up. On the far bank, beyond the fence, a shadow has separated from the trees—a man-shaped silhouette cut from midnight. Too far to see a face. Close enough to feel watched. The sensation inside me shivers once more, softer, like a tide drawing its breath. Fate, or something like it, stirs. I press my lips together and push forward, muscles screaming with cold. The current tries to pull me under; I let it take an inch and steal back two. When I drag myself onto the far bank, knees cracking against roots, I am shaking so hard my teeth ache. I crouch in the reeds and listen. The shadow doesn’t move. It could be a guard. It could be a tree. It could be him. It could be nothing. I am not ready to be seen yet. Not by that man. Not yet. Not until I’ve chosen the shape of how. I crawl along the fence until I find what I hoped for—a place where the wire has been gnawed through by patient teeth, widened by a hand that needed a way without permission. I slide through, cloak snagging, hair catching and tearing free. On Ravaryn soil, the cold feels different. Cleaner. Hungrier. Behind me, the river keeps moving, as if no one ever burned, as if no one ever sold a daughter to save a dying name. Ahead, a path. A palace of wolves carved into the wood. A tyrant on a throne of rot. A son with eyes like winter, building his own kingdom beneath his father’s boots. This time I will not wait to be offered like a prayer no one intends to answer. This time I will knock on the door of the dark and let it see me first. ......