Darkness swallowed her whole.
Rosella floated with nothing under her feet.
The black pressed against her chest like it wanted to crush the last breath out of her.
“Hello?” Only her own voice came back, thin and scared.
A light flared ahead and it made her squinted hard.
When her vision cleared, a woman stood inside the glow.
Long silver-white hair, a sharp violet eyes with a face so striking it almost hurt to look at.
“Are you the Moon Goddess?” Rosella whispered.
The woman didn’t speak, she only stared.
Yet something warm and familiar rolled through Rosella’s chest—like coming home after years of being lost, Like she had known this stranger forever even though she was certain they had never met.
She stepped closer without thinking.
Reached out.
The woman reached back.
Their fingers touched and suddenly, Light exploded.
Rosella was pulled into the strange woman’s orbit with a force that shook her core.
“What is happening?” Rosella tried to pull away, but it was useless.
Memories that were not hers slammed into her mind—blood on marble floors, a child forced onto a throne, a curse burned into skin, a knife sliding between ribs.
The force tore through the empty dark and shattered everything.
Rosella jerked awake with a raw gasp.
Cold stone pressed against her bare back.
She sat up so fast the room spun.
A death stone.
She was lying on a death stone—the kind used to prepare bodies for the final rites.
The entire hall froze.
A servant dropped a basket of linens.
Another holding a golden basin stumbled; water and oil spilled across polished tiles.
Someone screamed.
Rosella stared at them, chest heaving.
Was this the afterlife?
If it was, why did everyone look like they had just seen a ghost?
She didn’t recognize the high windows or the silver wolf carved into the far wall, yet something deep inside insisted she had lived here.
The knowledge sat wrong in her head.
“This is not IronClaw pack.” She thought.
A man in a white coat burst through the doors.
“Alpha!” Alpha?
He rushed to her side, eyes wide.
“We must take her to the infirmary.
Now.” Pack Nurses swarmed her, Rosella let them lift her onto a wheelchair because her legs still felt like water as they wheeled her through corridors that somehow felt familiar even though she had never walked them.
“She’s alive!” a voice shouted from the hallway.
The private infirmary smelled of herbs and clean linen.
The doctor—Douglas, a name that rose unbidden to her tongue—hovered over her, shining a light into her eyes.
“Are you all right, Alpha?” “Yes.
I’m fine, Douglas.” The words left her mouth before she could stop them and this made her frowned, she did not know this man, yet the answer had come as naturally as breathing.
“But… you were dead.” Rosella blinked.
“Was I?” “Yes.
The Beta was about to announce your demise to the pack.
Do you remember what happened?” The door slammed open.
A handsome tall man strode in like a storm.
Dark hair, sharp features, eyes that looked like they hadn’t slept in days.
He stopped dead when he saw her sitting up.
“You’re alive,” he whispered, as if the words themselves hurt.
“Uh… yeah.
Alive.” He crossed the room in three long strides and began examining her arms, her shoulders, the place over her heart, searching for wounds that were no longer there.
“What happened to you?
Tell me.
Who stabbed you?” Stabbed.
Rosella’s stomach dropped.
She had not been stabbed.
She had been held under black water by a man she trusted.
Alaric’s hands around her throat with lake water filling her lungs.
The last thought that she should never have trusted anyone, the way her mother’s face had flashed behind her eyes as the light faded.
Yet when she opened her mouth, different words came out.
“It was a strange man.
I was in the bathtub when it happened.” She froze.
She had never been in a bathtub that night, she had been at the lake, so why had she just said that?
And why did the name Sebastian suddenly float through her mind like a half-remembered nightmare?
“Colette?” the man said softly, searching her eyes.
Colette.
Who is Colette?
The name hit her like a slap.
“Yes?” she answered automatically again, and hated herself for it.
He studied her face as if trying to force something to surface.
“Is everything okay?” The pack doctor cleared his throat.
“Beta Elias, I must ask you to leave so we can examine the Alpha’s state of mind.” Elias’s stare could have cut stone, but he finally gave a short nod.
“Do that.
I’ll be back when I find whoever did this.” He looked at Rosella one last time, something complicated flickering behind his eyes, then turned and left.
The doctor asked more questions, Rosella answered some without meaning to.
Other times she stayed silent, drowning in the growing certainty that something was terribly wrong.
Memories that were not hers kept rising, sharper this time.
Warm water.
Rose petals.
A naked body that was not her own.
A masked man at the edge of the bath.
Sudden weakness.
The flash of a knife.
Mercury-laced iron sliding between her ribs.
The original owner’s last furious thought: Not yet.
My parents’ killers are still breathing.
Rosella jerked so hard the doctor stumbled back.
“I apologize, Your Majesty—” “I need to be alone.” She pushed past him before he could stop her.
Her legs carried her through halls she should not know, past servants who bowed and whispered “Alpha.” She didn’t stop until she reached a pair of heavy double doors and shoved them open.
Jasmine.
Lilies.
Lavender.
The scent wrapped around her like a memory that belonged to someone else.
A huge bed covered in scarlet sheets.
Floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over training grounds where wolves sparred under the morning sun.
Everything felt both foreign and heartbreakingly familiar.
Rosella walked to the tall mirror on the far wall.
And stopped breathing.
The woman staring back at her was not her.
Long silver-white hair fell past her waist instead of soft blonde waves.
Violet eyes—startling, almost glowing—replaced the blue ones she had known her whole life.
The heart-shaped face she used to see every morning was gone, replaced by sharper cheekbones and a colder, more regal beauty.
She touched her cheek with shaking fingers.
The reflection did the same.
“What the fuck…” She touched her face as if verifying if this was real.
She stepped closer until her breath fogged the glass.
This was the woman from the void.
The one she had mistaken for the Moon Goddess.
Colette.
Alpha Colette Ansgard.
The white hair woman who was supposed to be dead.
Rosella’s legs nearly gave out but she gripped the edge of the mirror to stay upright, staring into those unfamiliar violet eyes as the truth settled over her like ice water.
She was alive.
But she was no longer Rosella Shawn, the omega princess of IronClaw pack.
She was reborn, and she was wearing a dead woman’s skin.
And somewhere deep inside those violet eyes, she could still feel the original owner’s last desperate wish for revenge, tangled tightly with her own.