Chapter 2

Ella's POV

The first thing I felt was the sheets.

Impossibly soft. Silk — real silk, the kind I'd only ever seen in magazines and never touched, gliding against my skin like cool water.

Then came the heat. Something pressed against the small of my back, burning like a furnace in the shape of a man.

A body. A very large, very warm body.

Then came the scent.

Crisp cedarwood, whiskey, and beneath all of that, something electric — bypassing my nose entirely and hitting my bloodstream directly. Pheromones.

Wait.

How could I smell pheromones? Humans weren't supposed to detect them — our noses didn't work that way.

But there they were, flooding in all at once, making my heart pound like someone was beating a drum inside my chest.

The ceiling was a dark gray mirror. I caught my own reflection: a king-sized bed, a woman in a silk slip dress, and a bare-chested man with his arms locked tight around her waist.

That woman was me.

And that man —

I jerked my head to the side so fast my neck cracked.

Damian Blackwood.

Damian. Fucking. Blackwood.

Oh God.

My brain short-circuited completely.

Why?

In what parallel universe would I end up half-naked in the same bed as my boyfriend's older brother?

He was still asleep, brow faintly furrowed, his bare chest and shoulders marked with several visible scratches.

The kind of marks that only got left behind during sex.

I looked down at myself. Same story — red impressions scattered across my skin, painting a picture I desperately didn't want to see clearly.

His arm was still draped around my waist. On his ring finger sat a black band engraved with the wolf's head crest of the Greystone Wolf Clan.

I screamed.

He snapped awake instantly — eyes flying open, one hand shooting out to clamp around my wrist like an iron vice, squeezing hard enough to make me gasp.

Then our eyes met.

The predatory alertness in his gaze slowly faded, replaced by an expression that mirrored mine exactly:

Shock. Complete and utter bewilderment.

"How did you —" He let go of my wrist, his gaze dropping to the strap of my slip dress sliding off my shoulder, then quickly looking away.

I yanked the blanket up to my chin.

He sat up, rubbing his temple, his voice rough as sandpaper dragged across glass. "How are you in my room? How did you get in here?"

"I don't know. I just woke up here."

On instinct, I grabbed my phone from the nightstand. The moment the screen lit up, my blood ran cold.

The date.

Three years. Three years had passed.

I stared at that number. Three years' worth of memories should have been somewhere in my head — but there was nothing.

A blank. An entire stretch of life that should have existed, simply gone.

Then I noticed my hand. My left hand. My ring finger.

An identical black band. The same wolf's head crest. The same cold metal.

I looked down at myself again — the dark red lace slip, the marks scattered all over my skin, every detail screaming at me that last night had been intense.

I stumbled toward the bathroom, cracking my knee against the bed frame hard enough to make me hiss through my teeth, but I didn't stop.

The mirror.

It was me, but not entirely me.

A little thinner. A sharper jawline. Something in my eyes I couldn't quite name — a stillness.

The kind of calm that only comes after you've seen too much.

But what truly stopped me cold was the scar on my collarbone. A silver crescent, permanently etched into my skin.

A fated mark.

Lucas had told me about this once — when two werewolves, or a werewolf and the mate they'd chosen, formed a fated bond, they left this mark on each other.

The only way to break it was death, or what he'd called "the price of tearing the soul apart."

My knees went weak.

How? The man who'd thrown me out three years ago, who had mocked me, looked down on me, told me I wasn't fit to remain with his clan — how had I ended up as his fated mate?

Where was Lucas? How had he let any of this happen?

Damian appeared in the bathroom doorway. He'd thrown on a dark red robe — the same shade as my slip dress — left untied, his chest and abs on full display. Objectively speaking, devastatingly attractive.

I swallowed involuntarily. Judging by all available evidence, the version of me from last night had had a very good time.

He glanced at the ring on his own hand, then at mine. His expression went tight.

Good. The almighty Alpha was rattled.

Waking up to find out you'd bonded with the human you once couldn't have thought less of — that was enough to ruin anyone's morning.

But I wasn't much better off. This loss of control, this situation so far outside anything I could make sense of, made every inch of me feel wrong.

At least — I told myself, grasping for the only bright side I could find — the version of me three years from now seemed to be living a life I wouldn't have dared to dream of before.

"My last memory," he said, voice dropped low, holding something back, "is the night of the Dark Moon. I told you to leave. Then I heard you'd been hit by a car, and after that — three years of nothing. You?"

"Same. I remember the car. I thought I was going to die. And then I was just — here."

He stared at me for three full seconds.

Then he stepped closer. Too close.

I backed up until my shoulders hit the cold tile wall.

He lowered his head, his nose nearly grazing the skin along my neck — right where the fated mark sat — and drew in a slow, deep breath.

Every nerve in my body pulled taut. My heartbeat spiked. A pull, raw and uncontrollable, with nothing to do with reason and everything to do with instinct.

Then he stepped back sharply.

"Your scent changed." His gray eyes churned with something I couldn't read. "You're not purely human anymore. There's something else in your blood..."

"What do you mean?"

"It means something happened to you three years ago. Something woke up." He raised the hand wearing the wedding band, his thumb slowly tracing the crescent scar on my collarbone. "And whether either of us wants it or not — this is real. We're fated mates. Only death or the price of tearing the soul apart can separate us. I don't know how the hell things ended up like this."

His anger climbed with every word.

I understood it. He couldn't reconcile the person he'd been with whoever had made this choice.

But what I couldn't say out loud was this: when his thumb passed over that mark, my body leaned toward him.

Without any control on my part. My forehead drifted toward his, my lips drawing closer and closer. I heard his breathing shift — heavy, quick, pressing something down.

No. None of this was normal.

"I'm going to find Lucas," I forced myself to say. "I need to figure out what happened during these three years."

I turned to leave. He caught my arm.

"Ella. Listen to me." His voice dropped, and it was almost — almost — gentle. A tone I had never once heard from him. "No matter how many questions you have right now, don't do anything rash."

"Once you walk out that door, you're the Luna and I'm the Alpha."

"In private — I'll find out what happened. Trust me."

His hands rested on both my shoulders, large enough that I was nearly encircled by him.

For one hazy moment, I felt — safe.

This was the first time he had ever spoken to me with patience.