My Contractual Luna: Curing The Alpha's Decay

KIERA'S POV

Every step I took toward Janice echoed like a death knell against the marble.

Janice scrambled backward on her elbows, her manicured fingers clawing at the stone. Her manufactured sorrow evaporated, leaving behind the pale, ugly terror of a cornered parasite. She threw herself across Kirt’s unconscious chest. "Stay back! Don't touch him! Elders, look at her! She’s mad with jealousy! She’s trying to slaughter us all because Kirt loves me!"

Murmurs of unease broke out among the lower-ranking pack members. An Omega driven mad by an Alpha's rejection was an easy lie, a comfortable story they had whispered for generations.

I halted two paces from them, looking down at her frantic squirming. A cold, dark chuckle rumbled from my chest.

"Jealousy?" I tilted my head, my eyes narrowing into slits. "You flatter yourself, Janice. One does not envy a scavenger gnawing on scraps."

Before Janice could formulate another lie, my hand struck out with the speed of an uncoiling viper. I did not strike her flesh. My fingers hooked securely beneath the silver chain resting against her throat.

I jerked backward with vicious force.

Snap.

The delicate silver links gave way with a sharp metallic ping. Janice shrieked, clutching her neck as the sharp edges scored a red welt across her pale skin.

I stepped back out of her reach and lifted my arm, dangling the teardrop-shaped black stone high beneath the chandelier light.

"Janice Morgan claims I am mad with jealousy," I addressed the entire assembly, my voice steady, resonant, and devoid of fear. "Then perhaps the council would care to explain why my mother's dying legacy—the Weeks family Hearth-Pendant, carved from obsidian and sealed with our ancestral blood-runes—is hanging around the neck of an outsider?"

A collective intake of breath rippled across the chamber.

In wolf culture, bloodline relics were sacred. To steal a fallen clan's ancestral talisman was an abomination punishable by the stripping of pack status. The suspicious glares that had been pinned on me instantly swung toward Janice like loaded crossbows.

Janice's face blanched to the color of curdled milk. She looked toward the Elders, then down at Kirt, searching desperately for a shield. "I... Kirt gave it to me!" she stammered, abandoning him without a second thought. "It was a gift! I didn't know it belonged to your mother! Kirt swore he bought it from a merchant!"

On the floor, Kirt let out a low groan, his eyelids fluttering as consciousness slowly returned. Blood was still matting his hair to his brow. He heard her words, his expression twisting in sheer, humiliating panic. He had stolen it from my bedchamber three days ago while I was attending the herb harvest.

"You didn't know?" I stepped closer, looking down into her dilated pupils. My scent flared, saturated with the dominant, ancient presence of an unchained Healer. "Yesterday morning, when I overturned my family's quarters searching for it, you sat on my bed. You drank my tea. You told me with that sweet, poisonous smile that I had likely lost it in the forest, and that I should stop fretting over old trinkets."

Janice's jaw trembled. She opened her mouth to deny it, but the absolute, crushing certainty in my gaze paralyzed her tongue. The scent of her guilt hung in the air—stale, sour, and unmistakable to every wolf with a working nose in the room.

"Silence!" Brenda Hodge snarled from behind me, her voice trembling with barely suppressed malice. "A simple misunderstanding over a trinket does not excuse treason against the bloodline heir! You will pay for Kirt's blood with your own skin!"

I ignored the shrieking mother. I slipped the cold obsidian stone around my own neck, feeling the familiar, warm thrum of my mother's residual magic settling against my collarbone. It was home.

Then, I turned fully toward the dais of Elders, raising my right hand high toward the grand skylight that framed the midday moon.

"Before the Moon Goddess and the ancestors of Silverthorne," I proclaimed, the ancient words rolling off my tongue with ringing clarity. "I, Kiera of the House of Weeks, declare the betrothal contract between myself and Kirt of the House of Hodge void and severed. Their family is corrupt. Their honor is hollow. I reject this alliance, and I sever my blood from his."

A dull, aching throb flared across the palm of my hand as the ancestral betrothal thread snapped, but there was no soul-rending agony. We were never mates. We had never been marked by the Goddess. It was merely the burning away of a parasite's leash.

Kirt, struggling onto his hands and knees in a pool of his own blood, stared up at me as if the sky had fallen. To be publicly dumped, stripped of Healer inheritance, and denounced by an Omega at the very altar meant social and political death for an heir.

Janice, seeing the tide turn completely and realizing she was stripped of every defense, squeezed her eyes shut. She clutched her heart, let out a high-pitched, theatrical whimper, and collapsed backward onto the cold flagstone, feigning unconsciousness.

I looked down at her limp body, a cruel, mocking smile touching my lips.

"Fainting to escape judgment?" I whispered, loud enough for the front rows to hear. "How very convenient."