Cry Harder, Alpha: Your Luna Is The Lycan Queen Now! Chapter 05

Cry Harder, Alpha: Your Luna Is The Lycan Queen Now! Chapter 05 Thirty Days To Walk Away From My Alpha Alive

NARA’S POV

The last twenty–nine days are the worst of Aiden’s life. Yet they are the most peaceful of mine.

The illness eats a little more of me every morning. I bleed into a basin at dawn and again at night.

But my mind is quiet now, quieter than it has been in five years, because I have finally stopped waiting for that man to love me. A woman who has given up on everything cannot be hurt by anything.

I become a ghost in my own house.

I stop speaking to Aiden. I stop looking at him. When Jasmine empties my winter coats and my mother’s dresses out of my room, I do not say one word. I just nod and tell her to keep them.

“You’re not even going to fight me for them?” She stops in the doorway on the tenth day, my mother’s clothes bundled in her arms. She looks almost let down. “These were your mother’s, sister.”

“They will look lovely on you,” I say, and go back to my tea.

She waits for the tears. The begging. The jealousy she has fed on for twenty years. She gets nothing, and she leaves angrier than she came.

That is the part none of them understand yet. My silence is starving them.

Aiden feels it worst of all. A bully is nothing without someone to flinch for him. So he tries harder.

He kisses Jasmine in the hallway the moment he hears my step. He buys her a diamond necklace with my mother’s money and sits her in my chair at dinner with my Luna crest around her neck, watching my face the whole time.

I butter my bread. I eat. I say nothing.

On the twenty–ninth night, he finally breaks.

He corners me at the kitchen basin and slams his hand down on the counter beside my head. His eyes are wild.

“Why are you so calm?” he demands. “Five years you cried over me. Now you won’t even look at me. What is wrong with you?”

“Nothing is wrong with me,” I say. “Not anymore.”

“It’s him.” His lip curls. “You actually think the Lycan King wants you. You think a king is going to take a sick, barren, cast–off Luna and make her his queen.” He laughs in my face. “He was mocking me, Nara. He walked into my pack, saw a way to humiliate me, and picked up the nearest thing to beat me with. That thing was you. That is all you are to him. That is all you have ever been to anyone.”

He leans in until I can smell my sister’s perfume on his shirt.

“Walk out that gate and you die alone in the snow. No pack. No mate. No king. You’ll just be a body in a

ch nobody bothers to bury.”

I look at his hand on the counter. Then I look at the face of the man I once took a silver arrow for

“Okay, Aiden,” I whisper.

That is all. Okay.

I set my cup on the rack and walk out. Behind me, his fist goes through the wall. You cannot break a woman who is already gone.

Now it is the thirtieth day.

I pack one small bag. My mother’s shawl. Nothing of his, because none of it was ever really mine.

I leave two things on the bed for him to find.

The first is a jar of black ash. It is all that is left of every letter he wrote me in the years he was still pretending to love me. I burned them one at a time last night, and I did not cry for a single one.

The second is the rejection of the mate bond, written on paper and signed in my own black blood.

Then I put on my coat and I walk out into the blizzard.

I’ve decided that when I die, I’ll die by my mother’s grave at the west wing cemetery.

My mother’s carriage waits in the courtyard with the Spirit Wolf crest carved into the door.

It is the last thing of hers I have left. Jasmine stands in front of it, blocking the gates, five of Aiden’s guards behind her.

Aiden is not here to perform for, so she does not waste a single tear.

“You’re leaving on foot.” She runs one finger down the carriage door. “I need a royal carriage for my trip to the pack’s exclusive boutique. This one will do.”

“Move, Jasmine.”

“Or what?” She smiles. “You’ll bleed on me?” The guards laugh. “Look at you. You can barely stand. Twenty years I watched them fawn over you, the precious true daughter, and here you are, about to die in a snowbank while I ride to the clothing store in your mother’s carriage. I am now the true Luna of this pack.” She jerks her chin at the guards. “Take it.”

“Don’t touch it,” I say. My voice is very quiet. “You have already contaminated everything, including my mate, with your rotten presence. A piece of trash like you is far too filthy to even step foot inside my family’s carriage.”

“Watch me.”

She grabs my arm to throw me down into the snow.

The second her fingers dig into my skin, something wakes up inside my chest.

It not the curse, or anything I can explain.

It is something older than both, something that has been sleeping under my ribs my whole life, and it comes awake all at once.

White light tears out of me. There is no warmth in it. It is a scream of raw Alpha power, and it does not belong to any wolf I have ever stood beside.

It belongs to me.

The blast throws Jasmine off her feet and slams her into the stone wall. The five guards drop screaming arms flung over their eyes.

I stare at my own two hands. They are glowing. I did not know I could do this. I did not know I had anything left in me at all.

Jasmine crumples at the foot of the wall, sobbing, cradling her hands against her chest. Where she gripped my arm, her palms are burned black to the bone.

I never lifted a finger. She walked into it herself.

The doors of the house bang open. Aiden runs out into the snow, sees Jasmine on the ground, and his face goes red.

“Wha “What did you do to her?” He storms at me, his hand already up to strike. “You crazy bitch, I’ll…”

The great clock in the courtyard strikes midnight.

The first note rolls out across the snow, and it stops Aiden where he stands, his hand still raised over me.

The clock strikes again.

The gates of the pack house blow inward. Metal that has stood a hundred years explodes, and the pieces skid across the snow.

King Valerian steps through the broken gate.

He waited at the border for thirty days, exactly as he swore. His aura rolls out ahead of him, so powerful the air turns stiff with tension.

Aiden’s knees hit the frozen dirt. Every guard falls flat. Even Jasmine goes mute.

Valerian does not look at one of them. He walks past Aiden as though he is a heap of rubbish rotting in the mud, and he comes to me.

I turn my head and look at Aiden one last time, kneeling in the dirt of the pack he stole from me. I have nothing left to say to him. I just look at him, empty, until his face blurs.

Then the cold reaches my heart.

The thirty days are gone. The curse has counted all the way down, and now it takes the last of me I feel

Tife go out quietly, the way a candle does. My knees fold.

Strong arms catch me before I touch the snow.

That sweet scent closes around me.

And for the first time, I hear my wolf whisper:

True Mate.

Valerian pulls my dying body against his chest, and far away, as if through deep water, I hear him roar or help.

But it’s all too late.