Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 02

Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 02 — I Take the Money and the Secret
Julian’s transfer hit my account before I reached the parking lot.

One point eight million. He hadn’t even flinched.

I stood under the sodium lights with my phone glowing in my hand and let myself feel it for exactly five seconds — the vicious, giddy heat of it. In my last life, I’d left this ceremony with nothing but a torn dress and a shattered heart. This time I was leaving with a fortune and a plan.

“Wren.”

Julian had followed me out. Of course he had. Men like him couldn’t stand an unfinished conversation.

“You’re taking this remarkably well,” he said. “It’s unsettling.”

“I’m a remarkable woman.”

“You’re a wolfless bookkeeper who just got publicly discarded in front of the entire Silverpine pack.” He said it lightly, like it was flirting. “I’m curious. Where does a girl like you go from here?”

Up, I thought. Over your bodies.

Out loud I said, “Somewhere warm.”

He laughed. He was handsome the way a knife is handsome. In eleven months he’d stand on the northern wall and signal the Kaldrenn raiders through the fog, and my best friend Margo would die screaming in a village he’d sold for a title.

I stepped closer. He smelled like cedar and money.

“Julian,” I said sweetly. “Since you paid, you should get something for it. A little gift.”

His eyes darkened with interest. “I’m listening.”

I went up on my toes, close to his ear, and whispered eleven words.

“Cassie’s already carrying Damien’s pup. She’s six weeks along. Ask her.”

Then I got in my car and drove away.

In the rearview mirror, I watched Julian Ashgrove stand very, very still under the lights.

I knew about the pregnancy because in my first life, Cassie miscarried three weeks later and blamed me. She screamed it in front of the elders — that the wolfless freak had cursed her — and they’d stripped me of my house and my name and I’d said nothing, because I still thought love meant swallowing knives.

Not this time.

This time I planted one small, true, poisonous thing in the ear of the richest man in the territory, and let it grow.

By midnight, my phone had lit up nine times: Damien, Damien, Cassie, Damien, an unknown number, Cassie.

I let it ring and drove east, past the tree line, toward the industrial district where the streetlights died and the wolves who didn’t belong to anyone went to fight for scraps.

The Pits.

It’s a fine thing, being reborn. You get to walk into hell knowing exactly which door to open.

There were only three things I knew for certain about my new life:

One. In three hundred and forty-one days, the Kaldrenn packs would come through the northern fog, and my homeland would burn.

Two. I had one year to become something that could stop it.

Three. To do that, I needed a monster.

And I knew where he was chained.

In my last life, I only ever saw him once — in the final hour, when the northern gate fell and everything I loved was already ash. A creature came out of the smoke with a broken silver collar around his throat and killed two hundred raiders alone before they brought him down with spears.

They called him the Beast of the Ninth Cage.

Nobody knew his name. Nobody had ever bought him, because buying him was a death sentence — the last three owners had been found in pieces.

I pulled into the gravel lot outside the Pits, checked my balance, and smiled at the number.

One point eight million.

Damien’s debt.

Julian’s money.

I was about to spend every cent of it on the thing that would end them both.

Behind the corrugated doors, something huge slammed against steel, and the whole building shuddered.