The shower was the first thing I noticed, not the fact that I was tied to a strange bed in lingerie I didn’t own or remember putting on. The handcuff burned against my wrist as I pulled, and then the bathroom door opened. Steam curled around a towering figure, and I knew that scent—an Alpha’s scent. When his face cleared, my blood ran cold.
“Vivien, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” Kieran purred. My sister’s mate. My sister’s husband. The man I’d almost married five years ago, before I broke it off, before he ended up with Margot.
And now he was looking at me like I was his. When I protested, reminding him of Margot, he only frowned, genuinely confused. “You are my wife, Vivien. You’ve been my wife for the past five years.
”
I wasn’t. I had never been. I’d been engaged to him once, but I’d ended it. So why was he convinced otherwise?
And why couldn’t I remember how I got here? The last thing I recalled was the party by the pool. Margot’s party for Kieran. I’d gone back to my room.
That was it. But hours later, I was waking up in his bed, in her clothes, with a story in his head that didn’t match my own. When one of his men knocked him away on urgent business, he left me with a promise chilling in its sincerity: “Soon you’ll be my mate as well. No more delaying.
”
I dislocated my wrist to slip the cuff, reset it, and let it heal. I needed to find Margot, to warn her that her mate had lost his mind. I made it to the lobby before everything tilted again, because there, striding through the crowd, was Seth Taylor—the Alpha who had been missing for a month. The reason I’d come to this hotel.
I’d found his body hours earlier, cold and still in a hotel room. I’d tried to give him CPR. But there he was, alive, walking. The girl who had been crying over his corpse was with him.
I watched them go up to a room, and when I followed, I saw something worse through a crack in the curtains: Seth, strapped to a bed, blood flowing from his arm into a bag. I had to warn my pack. My Alpha, Harry. My best friend, Jake.
But Jake—this Jake, the one I found in the parking lot—looked at me like I was a stranger. “Vivian Woods,” he said slowly. “But since you married Kieran Reeves five years ago, you’ve been going by his last name. ”
Married to my sister’s mate.
A man I barely knew. And the one person I trusted most in the world had no memory of me at all. I knew what had happened then. An all-powerful witch had been hounding me for months, owing me a life debt, desperate to grant me a wish.
I’d refused her every time. But in the blur between finding Seth dead and waking up in Kieran’s bed, I must have made one. And now reality had been rewritten around that wish. Jake didn’t remember the pack we grew up in, the tree we climbed, the secrets we shared.
Harry, my Alpha, saw me as a potential enemy. Kieran believed I was his wife. My father, who had abandoned our family years ago, was still married to my mother. And in this world, faded mates—the magical bonds that had taken my father from us—seemed not to exist for the people closest to me.
Including Harry’s mate, Emma. I’d wished that away too, apparently. The witch gave me one way out: force the white magic of a faded bond to reawaken. Reunite a faded pair, and reality would snap back.
But the two faded pairs I knew were gone. Chloe’s mate was a violent abuser I wouldn’t go near. Emma, Harry’s faded mate, didn’t even exist here. Then I found her.
In this reality, she’d been turned into a shifter, and Cole—Kieran’s beta—had been tormenting her. She was terrified, powerless, and grateful to me for protecting her. Emma. If I could get her to Harry, everything might reset.
The only problem was that tonight, we were using Harry as bait. Kieran was manufacturing a serum from Alpha blood, sold through underground fighting rings, creating the chaos toppling packs across the country. Harry volunteered to be the next target, dosed with vampire venom and drained, so we could catch the mastermind. I knew the risk.
In my world, Seth had died from it. And then, in the middle of the club, Kieran pulled me aside. His grip tightened, and his voice dropped. “Why is it his name you scream when we’re in bed together?
”
Jake’s name. It hit me like a blow. The night I’d gotten so drunk I barely remembered it. He’d asked me something, and I’d whispered Jake’s name.
I’d carried that feeling, that raw need for him, even into a stranger’s dream. I tried to deflect, but Kieran’s eyes had gone cold. He knew. And I’d just told him I wanted to sleep in different rooms, taken my first real stand against the man who thought I was his wife.
I excused myself, following Jake into a private office. I shouldn’t have. I was in a strange world, pretending to be another woman, tangled in a plot that could get us all killed. But when he looked at me with that familiar fire in his eyes, I forgot every reason I had to be practical.
“You said there was nothing between us in your world,” he whispered, his mouth on my neck. “But you lied. You’re my mate. You’re mine.
”
I couldn’t deny it. I didn’t want to. We were interrupted by Emma, who swore to keep our secret and then told me something worse. Cole had led me to a hidden room under the hotel.
On a steel table lay Seth’s body—the second chance I’d thought my wish had given me, ruined. They’d upped his dose of vampire venom, and it had killed him. And then Cole turned to me and said, “It’s about time we get rid of him for good and officially crown you queen. ”
He called me Alpha.
In this reality, I wasn’t Kieran’s wife. I was the mastermind behind it all. The Alchemist at the center of the chaos.
I’d been the one running the operation all along.
