Cry Harder, Alpha: Your Luna Is The Lycan Queen Now! Chapter 06

Cry Harder, Alpha: Your Luna Is The Lycan Queen Now! Chapter 06 His Greatest Regret

AIDEN’S POV

I drag myself up out of the frozen mud. My knees will not stop shaking.

The King’s aura is still pressing down on my spine, but my Alpha blood refuses to kneel in my own courtyard.

Valerian is walking away from me with Nara in his arms. Her head hangs back over his elbow, pale and still.

“Stop!” I wipe the snow off my face and stagger after them. “Put her down. She’s faking, Your Majesty, she does this. She’s my mate. She’s mine.”

Valerian stops.

He turns around slowly. He does not raise his aura. He does not call his magic.

He just pulls back his free hand and drives his fist brutally into my face.

My jaw shatters. I hear it crack inside my own skull.

I fly backward and hit the gates hard enough to bend them, and I slide down into the snow spitting blood and two of my teeth.

“She is nothing to you.” His voice is flat and empty. He does not even sound angry. “She is dead. And it’s all because of you.”

He turns his back on me and carries my mate out into the blizzard. The white swallows them both.

I lie in the snow for a long time. The world spins.

She is dead.

The words rattle around inside my broken skull, and I throw them out.

No. She is not dead.

She is punishing me.

She wanted the Snow Lily instead of Jasmine, and when she did not get it she cooked up this whole performance to make me beg and crawl.

That is all this is. Another one of her scenes.

She will be back. She always comes back.

I spit more blood into the snow and haul myself up.

I stumble into the house and down the hall to her room.

I kick the door open, glaring at the empty space.

“You think you won?” I yell at the cold walls. “You think dying makes you a martyr? You are nothing! Do you hear me? You are nothing without me!”

The room is freezing, the window open to the storm, and there is nothing of her left in it at all.

There is a glass jar sitting on her pillow.

I walk to the bed. My heart is beating too fast now.

The jar is packed with black ash, and one half–burned scrap of paper is pressed flat against the glass.

I know that handwriting. It is mine. It is a letter I wrote her years ago, back when I still bothered to lie to

her and call it love.

She burned every one.

Beside the jar is a folded sheet of paper.

I pick it up. It is a formal rejection of the mate bond, and at the bottom it is signed in thick, dried black blood.

The second my fingers touch her signature, the bond inside my chest tears in half.

I scream. It feels like a hand has punched through my ribs and crushed my heart in its fist.

I go down on my knees on the cold floor, clawing at my own chest, dragging for air that will not come. I know what this is. Every wolf knows what this is.

A bond does not rip like this when a mate walks away.

It only rips like this when a mate dies.

She was not faking. She was never faking.

She is gone.

My hands shake so hard I can barely hold the page.

There is a second paper folded under the first. I open it, and I know her writing before I read a word. It’s neat, steady, and calm, even now.

‘Aiden. If you are reading this, the thirty days are over, and I am dead.‘

I read it on my knees in her empty room.

For five years you have called Jasmine a hero. You thanked her again and again for warning you about the rogues in the woods. You carved her a statue in the square because you believed she saved your life.

She did not save you, Aiden. She sold you. She made a deal with the rogues to hand them your territory, and the day of

the ambush, when you felt a silver arrow go for your heart, it was not a rogue who fired it. I was in the trees. I watched

mine draw the bow. I watched her aim at your back.

I jumped in front of you. I took her arrow in my chest so that you would live. The silver has been rotting my wolf–care ever since. Five years. I never told you, because you loved her, and you never once believed a single word out of my mouth.

The Snow Lily was the only thing that could pull her silver back out of me. You gave it to the woman who killed me. for a scratch on her knee.

I gave you my life. Tonight I am taking my soul back.”

The paper slips out of my fingers.

I remember it now. All of it. The ambush. The blood in the snow. Nara on the ground with an arrrow in

her chest.

And I remember what I did after. I left her in the healer’s tent, bleeding, and I went to hold Jasmine, because Jasmine was crying and shaking and saying how scared she had been.

Five years.

For five years I fed the snake and buried my mate a little more each day to keep it comfortable.

I gave the cure to the woman who murdered the only person who ever loved me.

A sound comes out of me that is not human.

My wolf is tearing at the inside of my chest, wild with grief, and there is no bond left to calm him, because I burned that too.

I get up off the floor like a dead man and walk out of her room.

Jasmine is in the corridor. A maid kneels in front of her, wrapping white bandages around her burned hands, and Jasmine watches me come with wet, waiting eyes.

She squeezes the tears out on cue.

“Aiden!” She lifts her burnt hands. “Look what she did to me before she ran. Look at them. You have to go after her, even if she’s a corpse, you have to make her pay for this, she almost…”

I do not say a word.

I walk straight up to her. I close my hand around her throat, and I lift her off the floor.