Cry Harder, Alpha: Your Luna Is The Lycan Queen Now! Chapter 08

Cry Harder, Alpha: Your Luna Is The Lycan Queen Now! Chapter 08 Saved By The Lycan King

NARA’S POV

(A FEW DAYS EARLIER)

I expect to wake up dead, in the arms of tny waiting mother on the other side.

At peace at last.

Instead, I wake up warm.

My eyes open to steam and blue light. I am floating in a huge pool of glowing water, and the heat sinks all the way into my bones. I have not been warm in five years.

I am not alone.

Strong, scarred arms hold me against a muscular chest and tight abs. I panic. I thrash in the water, my heart slamming.

“Shh. Easy, little wolf. You’re safe. Nothing can touch you here.”

The voice is deep and rough and shaking with relief.

Valerian.

He loosens his grip, so I can pull away if I want to, and that alone makes me go still.

I look down. The water turns slow circles of gold and blue. But close to his chest, it runs red.

Fear grabs me by the throat.

“I’m bleeding,” I whisper. I try to push out of his arms. “I’m sorry. I ruined your pool. I’m sorry, Your Majesty, I didn’t mean to…”

Five years with Aiden taught me to say sorry just for taking up space.

Valerian’s whole body goes tight. His jaw clenches, and something dangerous moves behind his eyes.

He catches my chin, so gently I barely feel it, and turns my face up to his.

“Do not ever apologize to me for bleeding,” he says. His voice is low. “You can bleed on me every day for the rest of your life, Nara, and the only thing I will ever ask you is whether you are warm enough.”

My eyes sting. I do not know what to do with a sentence like that. No one has ever said anything close to it

to me.

“But that blood is not yours,” he adds.

I stare at him. “Then whose is it?”

“Mine.”

He lifts one arm out of the water. There is a long, deep cut down the inside of it, still open, still bleeding into the pool.

“This is the Royal Miracle Pool,” he says. “The Snow Lily was the only medicine your healers could ever have named. Brewed in time, it would have drawn the silver out before your core died. But no mortal cure, rebuilds a core that has already failed. Only this water car, féd with the living blood and aura of a Royal Lycan, and no one outside my bloodline even knows it exists. It has never been given to anyone but a king.”

He says it plainly, as though it costs nothing.

“You cut yourself,” I whisper.

“Every few hours. For three days.” He brushes a wet strand of hair off my cheek. “I fed my aura into your chest and my blood into the water, and I did not let go of you once, because every time I let go, the cold started winning again.”

Three days. He tore himself open every few hours for three days to keep me breathing.

Aiden would not give me one dose of silverleaf while I coughed my own organs onto the floor.

A tear slides down my face before I can stop it. Valerian leans in and kisses it away. His lips are soft and careful. As if I am something that might break in his hands.

I pull back.

“Stop. Please.” My voice shakes. “Why are you doing this? What do you want from me?”

“Nothing.”

“Everyone wants something.” I wrap my arms around myself. “My whole life, every kind word came with a hidden motive attached. So tell me what this one costs. Tell me now, before I am stupid enough to believe it.”

He does not get angry. He does not sigh the way Aiden used to when I was being difficult.

He just looks at me with those fierce, exhausted eyes, and his voice goes even softer.

“It costs you nothing. I did not pull you out of that pack to own you.” He says each word slowly, so I cannot twist it. “I want you alive. I want you warm. I want you to sleep one whole night without listening for footsteps in the hall. If I never get more from you than that, it is still more than I had a week ago, when all you were was simply a figment of my dreams.”

I cannot answer. My chest is doing something painful and unfamiliar, and it takes me

moment to name

it.
Hope. It hurts worse than the curse ever did.

Then the light comes.

It bursts out of my chest, white and blinding, and I gasp. There is no pain in it. There is only power, a greai

Tirwave of it flooding the place where the rot used to be.

The silver is gone. My core is whole. I can feel it burning under my ribs like a second heart.

The light pours up out of the water and gathers on the marble floor, and it takes a shape.

A wolf. Enormous. Pure white, glowing at the edges.

My wolf.

She slept under my ribs my whole life, so quiet I forgot she was there at all.

And the day I married Aiden she vanished, and with her went the last thing in me that could have fought

the silver.

That is why the rot ate through me so fast.

She lifts her great head and looks at me.

Then she turns and pads to the edge of the pool, straight to Valerian, and pushes her head against his shoulder, and lets out a low, happy sound I have never once heard her make.

My own wolf trusts him before I do.

“The Seer in your pack lied to you,” Valerian says quietly, one hand sinking into my wolf’s glowing fur. “He used dark magic to force a false bond between you and Aiden, so your elders could seize your mother’s bloodline and her fortune. It was never a true bond. But his magic was strong enough to sink its teeth into your soul and act like real bond’s face, so your own body could never tell the difference. That is how it caged your wolf. That is how it let the illness rot you alive. And Aiden knew exactly what it was, every single day. That you felt for five years was never a true mate bond, Nara. It was a mountain of lies.”

He takes my hand under the water and presses it flat to his chest. His heart is pounding.

“This is a mate bond,” he says.

And I feel it.

The thing with Aiden always sat stale on my soul, choking in the worst ways. This is nothing like that.

It roars up in my chest like a fire lit in a freezing house, and for one whole second I feel completely. impossibly safe.

I want it so badly that it frightens me.

So I take my hand back.

“I can’t.” My voice cracks. “Do you know what I just walked out of? A few weeks ago I was on my knees in my own blood, begging a man who was meant to love me for one drop of medicine, and he laughed at me in front of the whole pack. I gave Aiden everything. My money. My body. My blood. Five years of my life. And it was never once enough. I have nothing left to give a person. I don’t even know how to be loved

anymore. I would only disappoint you too.”

Valerian is quiet for a long moment.

Then he lifts–my hand again, slowly, and presses his lips to my knuckles softly.
“Then give me nothing,” he says. “You have spent your whole life pouring yourself out for people who did not deserve a drop of it. That is over. From now on I will do the pouring, and you do the resting. He turn my hand and kisses the old scar on my wrist. “Lam not asking you to love me back today. I have waited my whole life to find you. I can wait a little longer for you to believe I am real.”

“And if it takes a year?”

“Then it takes a year.”

“And if it takes ten?”

“Then I will spend ten years brushing your hair and keeping you warm,” he says, “and I will call myself the luckiest man on the continent for every one of them.”

I stare at him. My walls are still up. But somewhere behind them, for the first time in years, something lets out a long breath.

I do not kiss him. I am not ready for that.

But I let him draw me back against his chest, and I rest my cheek over his heart, and I let him hold me in the warm water while my wolf curls up at the edge of the pool to guard us both.

For the first time in my life, someone is standing guard over me.

The days after blur together, soft and warm.

The sickness never comes back. My core burns bright and steady. I sleep a full night, then another, and no one kicks my door in.

On the fourth day, the royal maids dress me in front of a tall gold mirror.

The gown is elegant Luna silk, far more royal than my last, deep white woven through with real gold thread, and it falls over my healed body as though it was made specifically for me.

It was. I do not know the woman in the glass. She is not a dying, discarded wife. She stands straight. She looks divine. She looks like a queen.

Valerian stands behind me, brushing out my long hair in slow, sweet caresses. The most powerful man on the continent, doing a maid’s work, only because he likes the feel of my hair in his hands.

“You’re staring again,” I tell his reflection.

“I am going to stare at you for the rest of my life,” he says, and keeps brushing. “You should get used to it.”

I almost smile. Almost.

A knock comes at the chamber door. A royal guard steps in and drops to one knee

King. My Queen.” He keeps his head bowed. “There is a beggar kneeling in the snow outside the palace gates. He is weeping, and he will not leave. He begs for an audience.”

Valerian does not stop brushing my hair. “Who is it?”

“He gave a name, Your Majesty.” The guard hesitates. “Alpha Aiden. Of the Crescent Fang pack.”

In the mirror, Valerian’s eyes go gold with rage.

His aura drops through the room, and every candle flame bends and snuffs out.

He leans down and presses a slow kiss to the side of my neck, his gaze holding mine in the glass.

“Say the word, my love,” he murmurs, “and I will have his head off before he finishes his next prayer. You never have to look at his face again.”

I look at my reflection, at the gold, at the woman who is no longer dying. I think of thirty days of black blood, and a scratched knee, and a jar of ashes on an empty bed.

I smile. There is nothing warm in it.

“No,” I say softly. “Do not kill him. Open the gates.”

I turn my head and meet Valerian’s eyes.

“Let him crawl inside.”