The Luna Queen's Rebirth

I knew I was dying. All I wanted was to see my mate, Damien, one last time. But…

“Luna, Alpha… is very busy,” my handmaiden, Sophia, whispered, her eyes filled with pity.

“Please,” my voice cracked, a dry rasp against my parched throat. “Just go tell him his mate is dying.”

Sophia looked hesitant to leave me alone, her small frame trembling. After I urged her again, she finally nodded, tears streaming down her face as she scurried from the room.

A moment later, I heard the door creak open. My heart leaped. It had to be Sophia, returning with Damien!

But it wasn’t.

My stepsister, Chloe, glided in. She wore an elegant white dress that hugged her curves, and in her hands, she held my golden tiara. A small, cruel smirk played on her lips.

I stared at her, utter shock and confusion washing over me in a cold wave.

“How are you feeling, dear sister?” she asked, her voice dripping with mockery. “It’s a shame you missed my coronation as Luna. I know Damien would have loved for you to be there.” She placed the crown delicately atop her own head, her fingers tracing its intricate design with undisguised greed.

A grunt of pain escaped my lips. The poison was a spiderweb of agony, crawling up my side from where the assassin’s blade had struck. “What… what do you mean?”

“I mean,” she hissed, her sweet facade melting away to reveal the snake beneath, “that Damien just couldn’t wait for you to die before putting me in your place.”

My head began to pound. For ten seconds, the world went silent.

Deep down, a bitter truth I had long ignored began to surface. I had always been the one chasing after Damien, while he treated me with a cold, almost resentful indifference. Even after we were revealed as fated mates at the mating ball when we turned eighteen, his reaction had been one of sheer disappointment. I still remembered the way his jaw tightened, the flicker of dismay in his eyes when he realized the Moon Goddess had chosen me for him.

“I suppose we have no choice,” he had said afterward. Those words had cut deeper than any blade.

I had told myself it would get better once we were mated. Hoped that the bond would warm his heart.

But now? I was left longing for his presence as I lay dying, while he was crowning my stepsister? All of this, even though I was dying for him?

How could Damien be so cruel?

The memory of the attack a week ago was still vivid. An assassin, appearing out of the shadows with a gleaming knife. The target was Damien. He was on the verge of being crowned the Alpha King, but his ruthless consolidation of power had made him more than a few enemies. We had absorbed weaker packs until ours was the strongest in the realm, a fact that bred both fear and hatred.

When I saw the assassin lunge, my every instinct screamed to protect my mate. I pushed Damien out of the way, taking the brunt of the attack meant for him. I managed to dodge a fatal blow, and the pack enforcers subdued the attacker swiftly. But when Damien’s personal doctor examined the wound, the telltale swelling and the angry red streaks spidering up my neck revealed a horrifying truth: the blade had been tipped with deadly wolfsbane toxin.

Despite the best efforts of our pack’s finest healers, my health deteriorated rapidly. In a matter of days, I went from a healthy she-wolf in her prime to a withered figure wasting away in a sickbed, barely able to move.

For the first couple of days, Damien did stay by my side. In my delirium, I thought I saw caring touches and gentle gazes I had never received before. It was a sweet, fleeting dream.

But then, his visits ended abruptly.

The more I thought, the more restless I became. “I’m going to see him.” With a surge of desperate energy, I struggled to sit up, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. I was dying, but I’d be damned if I didn’t get answers.

Chloe blocked my path, her smile sharp and cold. "Save your energy, Ava. You know, Damien never wanted you as his mate. He only used you once he realized you two were Fated. He’s always loved me more—he just didn’t want to put my life at risk. Honestly, I would have replaced you even if you had lived.”

“You’re lying.” But the words were hollow. Thinking back to how he always had more patience, more smiles, more time for my little sister than for his own goddamn mate… it hurt because it made a sickening kind of sense. The pain blossomed higher, squeezing my chest.

She laughed, a tinkling, malicious sound. From her pocket, she drew a small recording device. “You don’t believe me? Listen to this.”

She pressed play.

“Let's make you my Luna queen. It’s the way things should have been all along….”

The voice… it was Damien’s. His deep, rumbling tone, promising my title, my life, to another. The shock was a physical blow. I collapsed back onto the bed.

Chloe quickly turned it off, her eyes gleaming with triumph. “You see, big sister? Damien never loved you. You’re too pathetic and needy to be loved.”

Tears filled my eyes, and the pain wrapped tight around my heart. The purple veining of the wolfsbane was stretching up my neck now, encircling my throat like a chokehold.

Before I could even process the recording, Sophia burst back into the room.

“Luna!” she cried, her face ashen. “Your mother!”

My mother? She had been with me every day, refusing to leave until midnight. I had been wondering why she wasn’t here today.

A smug look crossed Chloe’s face. “Mother objected to my coronation, naturally. Threw a big fit about it, screaming and throwing things. Damien had her arrested.”

What?

“She’s to be put on trial for obstruction and heresy.”

The wolfsbane tightened in my throat—or maybe it was my own anguish.

“No…” I whimpered. Surely, Damien wouldn’t… Surely, Chloe was lying… Surely, my mother was about to walk through that door and hold me in my final moments.

But Sophia’s devastated expression confirmed it. My mother had been arrested. On Damien’s orders.

I couldn’t even cry. It was too hard to breathe. I frantically grasped at my chest, tumbling from the bed to the floor in a heap of tangled blankets. Sophia cried out and rushed to my side. Chloe took a single step back, a flicker of something—fear? satisfaction?—in her eyes as she was forced to witness her stepsister’s final, agonizing moments.

Through the thickening veil of death, I heard a commotion outside.

The door burst open again. Damien. He stormed into the room, his face a mask of something I couldn't decipher. He started shouting. Chloe began to cry—that fake, practiced sob she always used to manipulate our parents.

He gathered me into his arms, his strong form trembling as he held my failing body. He whispered something, his voice desperate, but I was too far gone to understand.

The world faded to black. I felt my heart give its final, painful beat. I was dead.

My last thought before the darkness claimed me was a wish—a desperate, furious wish that I could do things differently. That I could make them all pay for what they had done to me. That I could have another chance.

And then I heard it.

Ring! Ring! Ring!

An alarm clock. Shrill and insistent.

I gasped, my eyes flying open. Sunlight streamed through familiar windows.

I was… back in my childhood home.