Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 11

Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 11 – What He Was, the Last Time the World Ended

He didn’t shift.

It was so much worse than that.

The dark under the tunnel bent, and Rhys came up off his knees with white light seeping out of his scars, and for one

endless second I was looking at something that was not a wolf, not a man – something enormous, folded up inside a

human body like a storm inside a jar, and old, God, so old –

“Rhys.” I grabbed his face with both hands. “Rhys.”

He came back with a gasp, and the tunnel lights popped back on, and he stared at me with his own eyes and absolute

horror.

“I saw it,” he rasped. “All of it. Not the dream. The real one.”

“Sit down-”

“I was there, Wren.” His hands closed around my wrists, shaking. “In the last life. I wasn’t a rogue. I got out of the Pits

eight months before the fog, and I burned my way north for one reason, and I got to that temple three minutes too

late.”

The blood roared in my ears.

“You found me,” I whispered.

“I found you dead on the floor with silver in your heart.” He was crying. This vast broken creature was crying, and his tears came down through eight years of scars. “And I picked you up, and something in me came open. Something the collar was built to keep shut. I killed everything in that valley. Kaldrenn, Silverpine, all of it, for eleven days, and then I put my own hand through my own chest, and the Moon-”

He stopped.

“The Moon what?”

“The Moon offered me a trade,” he said. “One life. One rewind. Given to the soul with the most owed to it.” His mouth twisted. “I asked her to give it to you. Because you’d know what to do with it, and all I’d do was kill.”

The tunnel tilted.

Every miracle in my life since I woke up on that dais – all of it, all of it had been bought.

–

“You gave me the year,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “The rebirth. That was yours.”

“It was worthless to me. You weren’t in it.” He pressed his forehead to mine, breathing hard. “So she took the memory instead and left me the dream. Every night, so I’d never stop looking. And I dreamed you eight hundred times in a cage and I thought I was going insane, until a madwoman with silver in her eyes paid one point eight million for a thing nobody wanted-”

I kissed him.

I want to be clear: I have been rejected, murdered, resurrected, and I have poisoned an Alpha in front of eleven

thousand people, and none of it took as much courage as that.

He made a sound like a man drowning and kissed me back like the world was ending, one hand fisted in my hair, the other splayed across my back like he could hold my soul in place.

When I finally pulled away, his forehead stayed against mine.

“Say it,” he said hoarsely.

“Say what?”

–

“That I’m yours. I’ve been property my whole life, Wren, and I’ve never once got to choose so let me choose, and say

it back.”

“You’re mine,” I said. “And I’m yours. And in three hundred and twenty days, we are going to burn Kaldrenn to the

waterline.”

“Yes,” he said. “Good. Excellent.”

Which is when my phone rang.

Blocked number.

I answered it on speaker with Rhys’s arm still around me.

“Congratulations, Wren.” Julian Ashgrove, sounding like champagne. “Number one in the realm. Extraordinary. I’d like to renew my offer, with better terms.”

“I don’t need a sponsor. I have thirty-one million and a ranking.”

“Oh, you misunderstand,” he said. “The offer isn’t from Ashgrove anymore.” A pause, delicious with pleasure. “The Kaldrenn Council watched you today. All of it. They’re prepared to make you a queen, darling. They’ve asked me to broker it.”

The floor dropped out of my stomach.

Not because of the offer.

Because in my first life, the northern gate opened eleven months from now and Julian was already, already, taking

their calls.

I’d changed the timeline.

I’d made myself the most valuable asset in the realm.

Which meant Kaldrenn wasn’t coming in three hundred and twenty days anymore.

“Julian,” I said, very calmly. “When?”

“Hmm?”

“When are they coming?”

He laughed. “Clever girl. Take the deal, and you’ll never have to find out.”

The line clicked dead.

And outside the stadium, over the northern ridge, the sky was already going white with fog.