The Second Sunrise
The pain came first. That was what Elena would remember most about it later—not the gasp, not the cold sheets against her skin, but the phantom blade still lodged between her shoulder blades, a white-hot line of agony that had no business existing in a body that was, impossibly, whole.
She shot upright with a strangled cry, her hands clawing backward, fingers scrabbling for a wound that wasn't there. Her palms met smooth skin, damp with sweat, unbroken. No blood. No ragged edges of torn silk and torn flesh. Just her own heartbeat, thundering so hard it hurt, and the frantic rasp of her own breathing filling a room that smelled of vanilla candles and fabric softener instead of copper and rain-soaked concrete.
*I'm dead,* she thought. *I felt it. I felt the knife go in.*
She had felt everything—the betrayal in Jake's eyes as he'd watched, the way his jaw hadn't even tightened while she bled out on the altar steps in a gown the color of first snow. She had felt Maya's hand, the one that held the blade, trembling not with hesitation but with a kind of hungry, desperate triumph. She remembered the wet, whispering sound of her own name from her stepsister's mouth, spoken like a curse…
