The Broken Luna's Second Chance With The Ruthless Lycan

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.