After My Mate Chose My Best Friend

I woke up gasping.

My hand flew to the right side of my neck — the spot where Leo's mark used to sit, where the skin had been raised and warm for years, where I could press my fingers and feel the bond humming like a second heartbeat. Nothing. Smooth skin. Unmarked.

Sunlight poured through the curtains. White curtains with tiny silver threads my mother had sewn before she died. I knew those curtains. I knew this room. The lavender bedspread, the oak desk in the corner, the framed photo of me and my father at the Silverfang summer run when I was twelve.

I was eighteen.

I was in my childhood bedroom at the Silverfang pack house, and the morning light was warm on my face, and I was alive.

Seraphina hit me like a wall.

Not the tentative stirring of a wolf waking for the first time — not the gentle nudge that other wolves described at their Come of Age. She was already fully formed inside me, silver-furred and snarling, her claws dug into the floor of my consciousness with the weight of every single thing we had survived together. Every memory. Leo's hands on Leila's waist. The documents I found too late. The rogues breaking through the tree line while my mate stood fifty yards away and watched.

The fire.

Pierce.

I pressed both hands flat against the mattress and forced myself to breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way the Silverfang healer taught pups who shifted too early and panicked.

"We're back," I whispered.

Seraphina growled. Low and certain. Not a question.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. My legs were shaking. My body felt wrong — too light, too young, too unmarked. I kept touching my neck. I couldn't stop. The phantom weight of Leo's bite was still there, like a bruise that had healed on the surface but not underneath.

I made myself stand. I walked to the mirror on the back of my closet door and looked.

Eighteen. My hair was longer than I remembered. My face was softer, rounder — the angles that grief and exhaustion had carved into it in the first life hadn't happened yet. My eyes were the same. Maybe not. There was something behind them now that hadn't been there before.

Today was my Come of Age Ceremony. Tonight, the pack would gather in the ceremonial clearing, and I would shift for the first time — or what they would think was the first time — and Seraphina would emerge under the moonlight, and every wolf in attendance would see her.

And somewhere in that crowd, Leo Evans would be standing with his Ironvale delegation, and his cedar-and-smoke scent would roll through the clearing, and the mate bond would try to sink its teeth into me all over again.

I had one day.

I pulled the blank journal from my desk drawer. It was the one my