The Broken Luna's Second Chance With The Ruthless Lycan

Aurelia POV:

"Drown, then! She jumped in on purpose to force Lord Bridger into an early mating ceremony!"

Kandace, the illegitimate daughter taken in by the Tate family, shrieked, her sharp voice cutting across the icy surface of Moonlight Shadow Lake. The water rippled and distorted, and the whole lake seemed to brim with malice. Freezing water flooded my nose, my throat, my lungs.

I had drowned before-not in lake water, but in a black cell beneath Tate Castle, torn apart on a cold stone floor. Three nights ago the Moon Goddess had rewound my death and thrown me back into this seventeen-year-old body, every scar of that life still carved behind my eyes. I knew exactly why I was sinking again. I had been waiting for this shove.

The heavy velvet of my court dress was an anchor around my body, dragging me down into the black. My chest burned. There was no air left anywhere in the world.

I clawed upward anyway, limbs cramping in the paralysis of the cold, the pale afternoon light above me shrinking to a dying coin.

Through the rippling mirror of the surface, I saw them.

Kandace clung tightly to Bridger's arm, her petite frame almost pressed entirely against his chest, her face wearing a carefully rehearsed expression of fear. Her every gesture seemed to announce that she was meant to become the Luna of this pack. And Bridger.

My betrothed. The Alpha heir of the Tate Pack.

He looked down at me drowning and felt nothing. His pale amber eyes held no panic, no worry, no mercy. Only cold disgust, as if I were a stray dog sullying his lake.

"Look at her struggle," a highborn lady tittered behind her feathered fan. "The Montoya family's wolfless daughter has finally lost her mind."

"Born without an inner wolf," a young warrior laughed, dumping his wine into the water above me. "If she dies, it only cleanses the bloodline."

In this kingdom, a wolfless woman was worth less than livestock. I had heard it every day of my life.

"Do something, my lord!" someone called.

"Why?" Bridger's deep voice rolled across the water, amplified by his Alpha dominance, and every word was a blade. "Aurelia, stop this disgusting performance. Did you truly think nearly dying would make me pity you?"

Kandace buried her face in his tunic, shoulders shaking with false sobs. "Aurelia is only jealous that I awakened my wolf and she never will. She wanted to frighten you, Bridger."

He stroked her hair. He actually stroked her hair, tender and gentle, while the woman he was sworn to marry sank to her death ten feet away.

Something deep inside me went very, very quiet.

I had not been a stranger to any of this. I had lived it before, in a life I never asked for.

In that life, I loved this man with everything I had. I gave him the Montoya fortune, the caravans, the mines-and the moment the last coin fell into his hand, the day he took the Alpha seat, he locked me in a black cell beneath Tate Castle.

Kandace came to my cell every night. With her little silver knife.

I died in that darkness, torn apart, forgotten, listening to the music of their mate ceremony drift down through the stone.

That was my previous life. The Moon Goddess had rewound it and set me down at its beginning once more-a perfect, merciless do-over. This fall into the lake was the first move I had already played a thousand times in my dreams.

Hatred ignited in my cold veins like lava, burning away the last of my fear.

So I did the one thing none of them expected.

I stopped struggling.

My limbs went limp. My body sank willingly into the pitch-black, my eyes fixed on the couple above through the dark water.

The pressure crushed my eardrums. My lungs were on fire. I refused to blink.

Bridger turned away first - of course he did. He wrapped an arm around Kandace's slender waist and guided her from the shore, cutting off my last hope of rescue without a backward glance.

But as she turned, Kandace looked over his broad shoulder, straight down into the depths where I floated.

And she smiled.

She mouthed the words slowly, so I could read every syllable through the clear water.

Die already. The Luna crown belongs to me.

My fingers curled into fists. My nails bit through my own palms, and tiny beads of crimson bloomed into the dark current.

A few scavenger fish tasted the blood. They slid out of the weeds, needle-filled jaws parting, lunging for my hand-

And an ancient seal inside my chest shattered like glass.

Silver light erupted from my heart - pure, holy, blinding. The scavengers scattered like ash in the wind.

A waterless barrier bloomed around my body, granting me one precious breath of dry air.

Then a second flood of sacred knowledge poured into my mind-the Celestial Healing Realm, a boundless space filled with divine herbs and ancient medical texts, inherited in its entirety. And deep within my previously lifeless pupils, the phantom of a massive white wolf flickered and opened its eyes.

The supreme bloodline of the Moon Goddess herself, unlocked in the darkest water of Moon Shadow Lake.

The pain faded. The power settled into my bones like it had always lived there.

And beneath the surface, in the freezing dark, I smiled.

So this was what I had been carrying all along, buried under the wolfless curse they mocked.

I let the silver light fade and drifted in the shadows, dead to anyone watching from above. My hand slid into my soaked sleeve, and with a single thought, a slender bone needle appeared between my fingertips, its tip gleaming with a faint blue venom.

In my memory, I had rehearsed countless times the scene of driving this thing through an enemy's throat.

I was about to get so many chances to practice.

Then - a scream tore across the lake, shrill and heart-wrenching, breaking straight through the water into my newly awakened senses.

Sadie. My maid. The only person in this world who was loyal to me.

In her previous life, she was tortured to death, broken beyond recognition, slaughtered for her loyalty to her mistress, and then her body was dumped in the mass grave outside the city walls.

Not this time.

Aurelia POV:

"Lord Bridger! Mercy! Save my lady! She cannot swim!"

Sadie's wail cracked across the lake.

She broke through the perimeter guards like a madwoman and threw herself onto the gravel bank, her knees slamming stone with a wet crunch. Blood soaked through her coarse linen dress before she even finished falling.

"Please, my lord! My lady is still in the deep water! She will drown!"

Bridger halted. He looked at her the way men look at something they scrape off their boots.

"Hold your tongue, worthless slave."

His heavy riding boot caught her ribs and sent her rolling across the dirt. The nobles gasped - in disgust, not horror. Silk handkerchiefs rose to fine noses, as if commoner blood carried plague.

Sadie curled around her bruised chest, wept once - then scrambled forward on hands and knees and seized his pant leg with bloody fingers.

"Young master, I beg of you! Miss Aurelia has no inner wolf! She cannot survive the water!"

"Young master, she's frightening me." Kandace melted into Bridger's arms with a perfect little shudder. "What is that creature trying to do to you?"

And that did it. His heir's pride could survive cruelty, but not embarrassment.

"Guards!" Bridger's voice cracked like a whip. "Drag this crazy wretch away and beat her to death!"

Two burly Alpha guards twisted Sadie's arms behind her back and hauled her into the air like a bird for the pot. She thrashed, kicked, screamed - and never once looked anywhere but the still, dark water.

"Miss Aurelia! Do not leave me! MISS AURELIA!"

Under the surface, I heard every syllable. My chest compressed until breathing meant nothing.

In her previous life, this woman had also fought those guards for me. For that, they pulled out her fingernails, one by one. Then they broke her legs and threw her half-dead body into the mass grave outside the city walls.

My grip tightened on the bone needle until the point drew blood from my thumb. The sting kept my mind arctic.

Not yet. I needed Bridger and Kandace to believe their murder had succeeded, clean and perfect. Confidence made men careless - and careless men died easily.

On the shore, Kandace tugged Bridger's sleeve, dabbing dry eyes with a dry lace handkerchief. Such a delicate performance.

"Bridger... no blood. Not on such a beautiful day." A pause, heavy with rehearsed grief. "Aurelia's temperament was always... difficult. But she was still my family. If she chose to end her own life rather than face reality, then we must respect her tragic choice."

Murder, rewritten as suicide, in front of forty witnesses. The surrounding nobles nodded, murmuring about Kandace's boundless grace and gentle heart.

Bridger pressed her hand to his lips. "You are far too kind. It is why she was able to torment you so."

Then, to the guards: "Because Lady Kandace pleads for your miserable life, you keep it. The water dungeon. Three days without food."

They dragged Sadie backward across the gravel, her cries thinning into the trees, two long dark trails carved into the dirt behind her.

Watch, I told the both of them silently as my smirk spread through the dark. You love a performance so much. I will build you the grandest stage this kingdom has ever seen - and when the curtain falls, you will die on it.

In my past life, I died a nobody - stripped of my name, my fortune, my face. This time, I would make certain the whole kingdom watched them fall.

I turned inward, into the newly unlocked Heavenly Healing Realm, and swept the glowing expanse of divine herbs and ancient scrolls for a weapon. Shelves of impossible medicines spiraled away into silver mist - cures for curses, poisons that killed through a single drop on the skin.

There. The Prismatic Water Viper's venom. Colorless. Odorless. Dissolved clean in cold water. A rapid neurotoxin that shredded high-ranking Alpha nervous systems in seconds - in a cold-weapon world that worshipped brute strength, the perfect invisible killer.

It was a stronger extract than the last time I brewed it - the last time being a previous life, when Kandace stole my mother's remedy journal and sold its pages to a foreign court. This time, every secret the Montoya family ever buried belonged to me alone.

A translucent drop condensed onto my silver needle, sheathing it in death.

Above me, the last spectators were drifting toward their carriages. Bridger handed Kandace up toward the golden-crested Tate wagon, entirely certain that Aurelia Montoya's corpse was settling into the mud below - and that by month's end, the Montoya banners would hang over Tate Castle as spoils.

The lake surface lay flat and silent. A mirror.

Good. Mirrors were for showing people what they refused to see.

I opened my eyes, and the ancient ferocity of the White Wolf flooded every muscle with explosive strength. The waterlogged velvet weighed nothing. The cold meant nothing.

I kicked.

I rose through the black water like a silver spear loosed from the depths-

And exploded through the surface in a wall of spray, ten feet from the entire Tate Pack, gasping at the sky they had buried me under.

Aurelia POV:

The splash swallowed the whole shoreline in silence.

Forty heads turned as one. Bridger froze with his hand on the carriage door, and I watched his face drain - the smirk dying, his amber eyes stretching wide enough to show white.

"Aurelia?" His voice cracked. He actually stumbled back a step, dropping his arm from Kandace's waist.

She wobbled on her embroidered silk slippers, and when her eyes found me standing waist-deep in the shallows - alive, dripping, staring straight at her - the innocent facade shattered clean off her face. What crawled out from underneath was raw panic.

"By the Goddess - she's alive?" The fan lady dropped her feathered fan in the mud. "How does a wolfless girl hold her breath in an icy lake for that long?"

I pushed the wet hair from my face and let my gaze drift across every stunned aristocrat, cold enough to frost their blood. Then I smiled at the happy couple.

Bridger's pride did what pride always does. It caught fire.

"You crazy woman!" he roared, drowning his fear in volume. "You didn't drown, so drag yourself out this instant! Do you have any idea what shame you've brought upon the Tate family with this pathetic stunt?"

Shame. Thrown by the man who had watched me sink and turned away.

Instead of scrambling to him with tears of gratitude as I once would have, I treaded water with lazy ease, staying exactly out of reach.

"Shame?" I laughed, and the sound skated across the lake like a sharp blade. "Lord Tate, my name is Montoya. The only shame here is wearing your skin."

Gasps. Murmurs. The notoriously timid wolfless orphan, insulting the Alpha heir to his face, in public.

His temple veins bulged. His hand closed on the silver hilt of his broadsword, half-drawing the steel. "You dare-"

"Bridger, don't be rash!" Kandace lunged for his sword arm, tears springing back into place like an actress hearing her cue. "The freezing cold must have damaged her mind! Aurelia, apologize to the young master - he has a generous heart, he will forgive your misbehavior."

Generous. I almost laughed again.

"Apologize?" I raised my voice so it carried to the last carriage. "To the betrothed who watched me sink beneath the waves without lifting a finger? Who embraced my illegitimate cousin before my body even surfaced?"

Every head swiveled between the two of them. The intimacy on that bank had gone far beyond what cousins - or a grieving betrothed - should ever display.

Kandace went deathly pale and snatched her hand back as if the touch burned. "Aurelia! How can you fabricate such filthy lies against my honor!"

"Lies?" I tilted my head. "Kandace, would you like me to dive back down and fetch the torn silk caught under your fingernails - from the moment you shoved me from behind?"

Her trembling hands flew behind her back.

That tiny, guilty flinch told forty witnesses everything they needed to know.

Bridger saw it too - I watched his heart sink through his boots. But men like him never pay for their sins; they silence the witnesses.

"Nonsense! Kandace cries when she steps on an ant!" he bellowed over the rising murmur. "Guards! Subdue that madwoman and throw her into solitary confinement!"

Four armored Alpha guards started unbuckling their heavy chest plates.

I let my fingers drift across the poisoned bone needle beneath the water and looked past them - across the lake, to the opposite bank. Beyond a towering black-iron fence lay the royal restricted grounds, and behind the flowing silk drapes of the lake pavilion, a suffocating aura rolled off the water like heat off a forge.

In my past life, I learned who sat in that pavilion far too late.

Jacoby Howell. Grand Chancellor of the Solaria Kingdom. A pure-blooded Lycan who held more absolute power than the Alpha King himself - the one man every pack lord in this region bowed to and feared.

And the one man Bridger would never, ever dare reach into.

A reckless, lethal plan clicked together in my mind, piece by piece.

So I looked Bridger dead in the eye, slowly raised my right hand out of the water...

...and showed him a single, graceful middle finger.

His face went slack with disbelief. Somewhere in the crowd, a nobleman choked on his wine.

Then I filled my lungs and dove.

No shore. No mercy. No Bridger.

My powerful, fluid kicks carried me straight through the deep water, toward the forbidden imperial pavilion and Jacoby-while Bridger's pure, panicked screams chased me across the surface.