Chapter 25: The Morning That Already Happened
Dinner was formal, long table, too much silverware, conversation conducted like a negotiation between people who already knew the outcome.
My mother sat across from me. Akari Amagi. A woman whose quietness felt strange in a house built on pressure and expectations. She chose her words carefully, as if every one of them mattered.
"You look well," she said. "Different."
"Training," I said again, since that explanation seemed to be working for everyone tonight.
Beside her sat Aria.
I hadn’t expected her back so soon. I hadn’t accounted for it, hadn’t planned around it. A small spike of panic hit before I reminded myself this was fine. This was actually good. This was the entire reason I came home in the first place.
She didn’t look at me much. Polite. Distant. The exact temperature you’d expect from someone who’d spent years being compared to a brother who’d never once tried to close the gap.
I didn’t push it. Not tonight.
Tessira sat beside me, eating in small careful pieces, watching the table.
My father said little. Watched more than he spoke, the way he probably watched everything in his own house.
Dinner ended without incident, which felt like its own small victory.
I went up to my room afterward, already thinking about sleep, and found Tessira sitting on my bed like she’d been there a while.
"You need your own room," I said.
"I know where it is."
"That’s not the same as using it."
She didn’t move.
"Tessira."
"I do not like the room they gave me."
"What’s wrong with it?"
"It is far from yours."
I sighed.
"It’s two doors down."
"That is far."
I crouched down so we were closer to eye level, which didn’t help. She just stared at me with the same calm patience she always had when she’d already decided something and was simply waiting for me to agree.
"Listen. Tomorrow, if you go to your room tonight, I’ll take you to the market here. Properly. Whatever you want."
She considered this with the seriousness of someone reviewing a contract.
"Promise?"
"Promise."
A long pause.
"...Fine."
She got up, paused at the door, glanced back once like she was checking I’d still be there in the morning, and left.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a moment after she’d gone, then lay down and let the day catch up with me all at once.
I was asleep before I’d finished deciding whether I wanted to be.
I woke up to sunlight.
The sunlight was wrong. And this definitely wasn’t the room I should have woken up in.
I sat up too fast and the world swayed.
Moonshade.
The hotel room. The familiar window. The crack of morning light cutting across the floor exactly as I remembered.
"Young Master, everything is prepared," Sebastian’s voice came from outside the door. "We are ready to depart."
My hands were shaking before I understood why.
I looked down at my shaking hands, then around the room.
We’ll leave tomorrow morning, I’d said. To this exact voice, in this exact room.
I was sweating. All over, suddenly, despite the cold morning air, my shirt already damp at the collar like my body had understood something my mind was still catching up to.
This had happened. This had already happened.
"...System," I said, my voice barely making it out of my throat.
Nothing answered.
I looked at the window again, half-expecting the elk in the distance, the frost line, the car ride that hadn’t happened yet that I’d already lived once, that I was apparently about to live again.
"What the hell is going on," I whispered, to a room that already knew the answer and wasn’t telling me.
****
The day repeated itself.
Same room. Same conversation with Sebastian through the door, the same words coming out of my own mouth before I could stop them, like the day was a track I was riding rather than living.
I didn’t fight it this time. Didn’t try to change anything. I just watched it happen the carriage, the plains, the elk in the distance, Tessira’s face against the window, all of it identical down to the smallest detail, like the world was reading from a script and refusing edits.
I didn’t sleep that night.
I sat by the window instead, waiting to see what happened what actually happened, the part the first loop hadn’t shown me, the part I must have slept through.
Around midnight, I felt it.
A pressure in my chest. Small at first.
I looked down.
There was a hole where there shouldn’t have been one. Clean through me, the kind of wound that didn’t make sense even as I was looking directly at it too precise, too quiet, no blade, no sound, like something had simply decided a piece of me didn’t belong there anymore and removed it.
I tried to call out. Nothing came except blood, filling my mouth before I understood what was happening.
The pain arrived a half-second behind the wound,
I don’t remember much after that. Just the floor coming up to meet me, and the long, ugly process of a body trying to keep functioning with a hole in it.
It took a while.
I was aware of all of it.
I woke up in the car.
Tessira’s head was on my shoulder. Sebastian’s voice up front, low, talking to no one in particular the way he sometimes did when he thought no one was listening.
I looked out the window.
I woke up four hours into the journey from Moonshade.
Not in the hotel room with the wrong sunlight. The car already moving, the plains already half-passed, the window showing land I recognized from somewhere past the midpoint of the trip.
I sat up too fast. Tessira stirred against my shoulder but didn’t wake.
I looked out.
We were closer to the estate than we should have been.
This wasn’t the start of the loop.
But we were nowhere near as far as we’d gotten before the attack.
Four hours after departure, I thought.
Last time I woke up in Moonshade.
This time I woke up four hours into the journey.
My hands were shaking again.
I pressed one against my chest, just to check. No hole. No blood.
But I could still feel where it had been.
I didn’t know if that was good news or the beginning of something much worse.
I didn’t know what yet. I just knew I had a full day again, and I intended to use every hour of it differently than I had the last time.
The carriage pulled forward.
I didn’t sleep.
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