After Rebirth, I Ruined His Alpha Reign

Alexandria POV:

I fought for him for ten years.

Thirty thousand lives buried in the snow to pave his road to the throne.

His reward to me? A silver arrow-through my back, out my chest.

I carved that arrow with my own hands.

With my last breath, I asked him: Why.

He said: "An Omega commander is a disgrace."

Thirty years of blood, and he told me I shamed him.

He stepped over my body, pulled my sister into his arms, and planned their winter-solstice wedding-white rose petals, the ones she wanted.

The Moon Goddess heard me. She sent me back. Eighteen years old, before any of it happened.

Back to the dungeon, chains biting into my flesh.

I snapped my thumb, slipped the cuffs.

Iron chain wrapped around my fist-cold, but more honest than his arms ever were.

Thirty thousand lives on my back.

He said Omega is a disgrace.

Fine.

This time, I'll show him exactly-

how many cuts it takes for an Omega to tear down his throne.

***

I wiped the blood from my silver dagger.

The motion was familiar. Automatic.

The scent of pine and spilled life hung heavy in the air, a perfume I knew too well. Snow clung to the branches of the tall cedars, glowing under the full moon. Around me, the battlefield lay in silence-fallen soldiers in torn Southern Fang colors, a trampled banner half-buried in the crimson-stained snow, the dying embers of a campfire casting faint orange ghosts across the carnage. I was the last one still standing. The last commander. It was cold, but the heat of battle still lingered in my veins.

A smile touched my lips.

We had won.

The Southern Fang Legion, my legion, had pushed back the rogue packs at the border. The Northern Crest Dominion was safe.

And Daryle's path to the throne was clear.

Footsteps crunched in the snow behind me. My heart leaped, a frantic bird against my ribs.

I sheathed my dagger and turned, my smile widening. Love, pure and fierce, washed away the exhaustion.

He stepped out from the shadows of the trees. Daryle Estrada. My Daryle. The Alpha heir to the Northern Crest Dominion, the man I deeply loved , the future king I had bled for. His golden hair was a crown in the moonlight, his face as handsome as ever. But the joy I expected to see wasn't there.

Only a strange, dark cloud in his blue eyes.

"You came," I breathed, stepping forward. I wanted to throw my arms around him, to feel the solid strength of his body against mine.

He held up a hand, stopping me.

The gesture was a splash of icy water. My smile faltered.

His gaze shifted, looking past me, into the darkness. A knot of unease tightened in my stomach. What was he looking at?

"Alex," he said, his voice rough. "We won. But the cost was too high."

"The legion's sacrifice was necessary," I said softly, trying to soothe the shadow from his face. "For the Dominion. For your future."

I remembered the night I had taken that blade meant for his chest, the scar still hidden beneath my leathers. I remembered the three-month siege I had commanded in his name while he recovered from a fever, the letters I never sent him about the men I'd lost, the nightmares I never confessed. He didn't need to know the cost. He only needed to sit on the throne I was building for him.

He finally moved, closing the distance between us. His arms wrapped around me, pulling me into a crushing embrace. It was too tight. It hurt.

I could feel the hard plates of his armor digging into my skin through my own blood-stained leather.

He buried his face in my hair, his voice a low whisper against my ear.

"Yes," he murmured. "For my throne."

Something was wrong. His heartbeat was a slow, cold drum against my chest. There was no warmth in it, no relief of a lover reunited.

I tried to pull back, to see his face, but his arms were like iron bands.

No, I told myself. This is Daryle. The boy who held me when I wept over my first fallen soldier. The man who promised me a future. I was being foolish. The battle had made me paranoid. Any moment now, he would laugh and kiss my forehead and tell me I'd imagined it all.

He whispered again, and this time, his voice was stripped of all warmth. It was the sound of winter ice.

"And that is why you have to die."

Before the words fully registered, a searing agony erupted in my back.

It was a pain unlike any I had ever known. Not the clean cut of a sword or the tear of a claw. This was fire. A holy, silver fire that burned through flesh and soul.

A choked gasp escaped my lips.

My strength vanished in an instant, draining out of me like water from a shattered glass. I sagged in his arms, my legs refusing to hold me.

I looked down.

The tip of a silver arrow protruded from my chest, right over my heart. It gleamed, wet and crimson in the moonlight. My blood, dark and steaming in the cold air, gushed from the wound.

And then my fingers, trembling and slick with blood, brushed against the arrow's shaft. There, just below the fletching-a familiar set of shallow grooves I had carved myself. A spiral, then a crescent moon. My mark. I had shaped this arrow with my own hands, had pressed it into his palms on a night when he'd sworn by the Moon Goddess that it would bind us forever.

Daryle let me go.

I crumpled to the snowy ground, a puppet with its strings cut.

Gasping, I forced my head up. I looked at the man I loved, the man I had fought for, bled for, killed for. My mind couldn't connect his actions to the man I knew.

"Why?" The word was a bloody cough.

A figure emerged from the trees behind him. A woman, dressed in a rich velvet gown completely out of place on a battlefield.

My half-sister. Christal Torres.

A triumphant, vicious smile twisted her pretty face. She held a silver bow in her delicate hands.

But it wasn't the bow or the smile that shattered the last piece of my heart.

It was the necklace around her throat.

A delicate chain of silver, with a single, perfectly carved iris. My mother's necklace. Her only legacy to me. My mother had placed it around my neck on the day she died, her cold fingers trembling against my skin. She had whispered that it carried her love, her protection, her hope for my future. I had worn it for years, slept with it pressed against my chest, touched it before every battle as though she were still with me. And now Christal wore it like a trophy, like a trinket she'd picked up from a corpse.

Christal glided to Daryle's side, tucking her arm into his possessively. She looked down at me, her eyes gleaming with a hatred I had always known was there but had never wanted to believe.

"Because you were in the way, sister," she said, her voice dripping with false sweetness. "Daryle's future queen can only be me."

I looked at Daryle, begging him with my eyes to say it wasn't true. To say this was some horrible mistake.

He stared back, his face a mask of cold indifference.

"An Omega commander is a disgrace, Alex," he said, his voice flat. "Not an honor. You brought me shame, not glory."

The world fractured.

It was all a lie. Our love. His promises. The future we were supposed to build.

He had used me. He had used my love, my loyalty, my legion.

Thirty thousand of my soldiers. Dead. Their blood was the mortar for the throne he would build with my murderer.

The last of my life was fading, but a new fire was kindling in its place. Hate. Pure, black, and absolute. It flooded my veins, turning my violet eyes to a burning red.

I pushed myself up onto one elbow, my last act of defiance.

My voice was a ragged, blood-soaked whisper, but it carried the weight of my dying curse.

"Daryle... Christal..."

I coughed, blood spattering the white snow.

"If there is another life... I will destroy... everything you hold dear..."

My breath gave out. My head fell forward, and the world went dark.

But it wasn't the end.

A strange lightness filled me. I felt myself float upwards, a phantom of smoke and moonlight. I looked down and saw my body, lying still in the snow, the silver arrow a cruel monument in my chest.

I was a soul untethered, held to this place by the sheer force of my hatred.

I reached for the arrow, my ghostly fingers closing around its shaft-and passed straight through. Nothing. I couldn't touch it. Couldn't pull it out. Couldn't even close my own dead eyes. I tried to shove a burning branch from the dying campfire toward his retreating back. My hand went through the wood like mist. I screamed at him, called his name, but no sound left my spectral throat. I was a witness to my own murder, powerless and invisible.

I watched as Daryle didn't even give my body a second glance. He took Christal's hand, the one that had just sent me to my death, and turned away.

"Finally," I heard Christal laugh, her voice light and careless. "Now we can plan the wedding without her shadow looming over everything. I want the winter solstice. And the northern rose petals, the white ones."

"Whatever you wish," Daryle replied, and his voice carried no grief, no guilt. Only relief.

They walked back into the forest, their figures disappearing into the shadows as if they had just taken out the trash. Their laughter faded into the wind, bright and unburdened, mixing with the whisper of falling snow.

Leaving me alone in the cold, with nothing but the moon and my rage for company.

I looked down at my body one last time. The arrow still jutted from my chest, and in the moonlight, I could see the faint grooves of my own carving catching the silver glow-the spiral, the crescent moon, the mark I had once called love. Now it was a monument to my blindness.

I would not let it be my epitaph.

"Moon Goddess. Mother of all wolves. I had prayed to you before every battle, thanked you for every victory. I gave you my blood, my loyalty, my life. And now I am nothing but a ghost watching my murderers laugh."

I looked up at the moon, full and indifferent, and I did not pray. I raged.

"If you have any justice in you," I howled into the silence, "let me live again. Not for peace. Not for mercy. For vengeance. I will burn their kingdom to ash. I will make them watch everything they love turn to dust. Take my soul as payment. I do not care. Just give me one more breath-one strike-one chance to make them suffer as I suffer."

The moon gave no reply. The snow fell, silent and endless.