Reborn in the Age of Human-Beast Marriages novel · Chapter 1 of 12
Chapter 1: The Wrong Bed
The last thing I felt in my past life was the smoke.
It filled my mouth, scraped at my chest, and behind the closed door my son was crying, calling for me.
He was two years old.
He was a white wolf with blue eyes, the first hybrid born since the end of the Great War, and they had placed him in my arms like a crown.
I opened my eyes with a scream stuck in my throat.
There was no smoke.
There was a red carpet beneath my feet, hundreds of candles along the stone walls, and a heavy green dress squeezing my ribs.
I was standing at the entrance of the Hall of Alliances.
I recognized every column, every banner, every face.
It was the day of the Rite.
The day when, every hundred years, the heirs of the three Beast Houses waited on their stone beds for a human bride to choose.
The wolf on the silver bed.
The fox on the copper bed.
And on the iron bed, alone, the jaguar, whom no woman ever approached.
I pressed my hand to my stomach.
It was flat.
I was still alive.
I heard a soft laugh beside me and my blood ran cold.
"What are you waiting for, sister?"
Candelaria wore a white dress with golden ribbons, her brown hair loose over her shoulders, the smile of an angel.
She looked at me a second too long.
And I understood.
She remembered too.
"I'll leave you the fox," she whispered. "Given how badly the wolf turned out for you."
She lifted her skirt and walked down the carpet with an elegant haste.
The whole hall followed her with their eyes.
We human brides were supposed to approach a bed, sit on it, and take the heir's hand.
Whoever sat first on a bed was bound to that heir forever.
Candelaria crossed the hall, climbed the three silver steps, and sat on the wolf's bed.
She took Romulo Aldana's hand.
He smiled.
A perfect, warm smile, the one I had taken for devotion for two years.
Blond, gray-eyed, with the white coat of his pack buttoned up to his neck.
He looked at me over my sister's shoulder.
And for the first time I saw what his gaze said.
Nothing warm.
A cold, wordless question: what are you?
Then I remembered something I hadn't wanted to remember.
The night of the fire, my room smelled of oil, not wood.
And Romulo, who said he loved me, never came.
He never came because he had never loved me.
He had loved the heir I was carrying.
A murmur rippled through the hall.
There was only one bride left unchosen.
Me.
The elders of the Council, seated in their black chairs, watched me patiently from the back.
The fox, Saul Benavides, smiled on his copper bed with the carelessness of someone who knows a sister will be left over.
If I sat there, I would repeat everything.
A husband who infected the women he claimed to love, and a sister who would get to everything first.
No.
I lifted my gaze to the last bed.
The iron one.
Black, enormous, without a single candle around it.
And on it, sitting with his elbows on his knees, a massive man with black hair tied back and a claw scar running from his ear down to his neck.
Baltasar Zaldivar.
The jaguar.
People said he had killed three betrothed women.
No one even dared to look at his bed.
In my past life, I didn't even remember him.
Until the day of my burial, among a crowd of faces, I saw a tall man, alone, holding a black orchid.
He placed it on my grave and left without a word.
No one else cried for me that afternoon.
I crossed the hall.
A silence fell so deep I could hear the candles crackling.
I passed the copper bed.
Saul raised his eyebrows.
I passed the silver bed.
Romulo stopped smiling.
Candelaria stared at me, eyes wide.
I climbed the iron steps unhurriedly, my back straight.
Baltasar lifted his head.
He had yellow eyes, like a big cat's, that gleamed for an instant in the light.
I stopped before him.
"I choose this bed," I said, loud enough for the Council to hear.
The jaguar didn't move.
"I choose Baltasar Zaldivar."
I sat down beside him and took his hand.
It was huge, rough, warm.
He went rigid, as if he couldn't believe anyone would touch him.
Behind us, Romulo burst out laughing.
"The human chose the murderer!"
The hall erupted in whispers.
Baltasar leaned down to my ear.
His voice was deep, hoarse from disuse.
"They say I kill my wives."
I squeezed his hand.
"Then you'd better kill me after the wedding."
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