The last thing Elara knew was the cold.
It was a brutal, invasive cold that seized her lungs and turned her blood to ice. The dark water of the harbor was a suffocating shroud, pulling her down. The weight of the chains around her ankles was an iron certainty, a final verdict.
Above the surface, distorted by the choppy water, was Julian’s face. Handsome, charming Julian. His voice, a ghostly ripple, was the last sound she heard.
“It’s just business, my dear,” he said, his tone as smooth as the single malt they’d shared just an hour before. “And you were the key piece. It’s a shame Kael never learned to play the game properly.”
A scream bubbled in her throat, stolen by the sea. Her thoughts shattered into fragments of betrayal and regret. Kael. Her husband. The man whose indifference had left her vulnerable to a wolf like Julian. The man who would now never know what happened to the wife he never wanted.
The world dissolved into silent, freezing black.
—
Elara jolted awake with a gasp that tore at her throat. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage of bone. She was not cold. She was warm. She was not drowning in darkness, but drowning in light.
Sunlight streamed through the vast bay windows, illuminating a room she hadn’t seen in five years. Her old bedroom in the Sterling mansion. The air was thick with the cloying scent of Stargazer lilies, her mother’s favorite.
“Elara! Good heavens, child, are you still abed?”
Her mother’s voice, sharp and practical, came from the doorway. Elara stared, her mind reeling. Her mother, Vivienne Sterling, looked a decade younger, her face unlined by the grief that would later etch itself there.
“Your final fitting is in an hour. The Van Der Kamps do not wait, even for a bride on her wedding day. Up! Now!”
The words hit her like a physical blow. Wedding day.
She scrambled from the bed, her legs weak, and stumbled to the full-length mirror. The reflection that stared back was a ghost’s. A young woman of twenty-two, with wide, innocent eyes and soft, unblemished skin. Her hair fell in artful, pre-styled waves. She was wearing the silk chemise she’d worn that morning, the morning she married Kael Vance.
Her hands flew to her throat, expecting to feel the gnawing cold of the harbor. She found only warm, living skin.
“This is a dream,” she whispered to the ghost in the mirror. “A cruel, beautiful dream.”
But the silk under her fingers was real. The anxiety in her mother’s voice was real. The terrifying, impossible truth was real.
She was back.
