The Broken Luna's Second Chance With The Ruthless Lycan

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.