Cry Harder, Alpha: Your Luna Is The Lycan Queen Now! Chapter 10

Cry Harder, Alpha: Your Luna Is The Lycan Queen Now! Chapter 10 Crushed Under Her Golden Heel

NARA’S POV

Valerian’s eyes go pitch black. He rises to his full height, and the air in the room drops ten degrees.

He is going to tear Aiden’s head from his shoulders and hang it on the wall, and he is going to enjoy it.

I lay my hand flat against his chest.

“No, my love.”

He stops at once. All that killing rage, and one touch from me folds it away.

He steps back and gives me the floor, because he is the only man alive who ever understood it was always mine to take.

I stand up from my throne.

“You do not get to fight my King, Aiden.” My voice is very cold and very calm. “I am not a slab of meat for two men to fight over. I stopped being a prize the day you threw me out into the snow.” I walk down the steps toward him, slow, one at a time. “And you are not worthy of dirtying his hands.”

I let go of the leash on my power.

My Royal Spirit Wolf pours out of me and fills the whole hall, and the gravity slams down tenfold.

The candles melt to nothing. The guards brace against the walls.

And Aiden, the great Alpha of the Crescent Fang, is driven flat onto his face against the marble, pinned, gasping, unable to lift so much as his chin.

He claws one trembling hand out across the floor toward my feet.

“Nara…” he chokes. “Please…”

I step forward.

I bring the sharp gold heel of my boot down onto the back of his outstretched hand.

SMASH.

Aiden screams.

The sound tears out of him and rings off the high ceilings. I look down at him with nothing at all on my face, and I press my weight into it, and I crush the hand he once used to give my cure to my murderer.

“You want healers for your dying pups,” I say.

“Yes!” he sobs into the stone. “Yes, please, they are only children, please…”

A royal guard steps forward and lays a scroll on the floor by his weeping face. It glows faintly at the edges.

binding contract, the kind that cannot be undone once it is signed in blood.

“I will save your pups,” I tell him. “I am not the one who lets children die to win an argument. But the Crescent Fang pack is finished. You will sign every stone of that territory over to me. It becomes part of the Lycan Kingdom tonight, and I am its only ruler. Your name comes off that land forever.”

He does not even fight it. He has nothing left to fight with.

He drags his broken, bleeding hand across the bottom of the scroll and smears his signature there in his own blood.

The seal flares gold. It is done.

I turn to the hall.

“As Queen of this territory, hear my judgments.”

Aiden lifts his wet face off the floor.

“The elders who buried my mother’s betrothal and sold me to steal my dowry are stripped of their wolves.” The guards move at my word. “Cast them out into the frozen wastelands with the clothes on their backs. Let them scavenge in the snow the way they once left me to.”

“And Jasmine?” Aiden whispers. Even now, some sick part of him has to know.

“Jasmine goes on a boat tonight,” I say. My voice does not change. “To the Silver Rock, in the middle of the black sea. She will sit in that stone cell in the dark, alone, with no one left to lie to and no one left to charm, for every single day she has remaining. She wanted my life. Shé can have a cell, and think about it.”

Aiden puts his forehead back down on the cold floor. He is done.

“And me?” he sobs. “Just kill me, Nara. End it. I can’t live in a world where you look at me like that. Please. Give me death.”

Valerian steps up behind me and wraps both arms around my waist.

He pulls my back against his chest, rests his chin on my shoulder, and presses a slow kiss just under my ear, smiling against my skin, watching Aiden watch him do it.

“Death is far too kind for you,” I say.

I drop a silver collar onto the floor beside his head. It lands with a dull, ugly clang.

“Put it on.”

His good hand shakes over it.

“You are not an Alpha anymore. You are not anything anymore. You are the lowest servant in my palace, and you will spend the rest of your life on your knees, washing my floors.” I turn my face into Valerian’s jaw, and I let Aiden see me do it. “And every single day, while you scrub, you will look up and watch a real

man love me the way you never once could.”

Aiden’s fingers close around the collar. He is sobbing too hard to speak.

I turn my back on him, the way he turned his back on me ninety–nine times, and I let my King walk me back to my throne.