My Mate Sentenced Me To Death — Now I Am The Alpha Queen

Part 1

I knelt on the freezing cobblestone of the great hall.

The rough surface bit deep into my bare knees.

My silver-white gown was a ruined mess of mud and fresh blood.

Only three moons ago, I had worn it to be crowned Luna.

The metallic stench of copper overwhelmed the damp scent of the relentless autumn rain.

I looked up through the tangled strands of my dark hair.

My vision was blurry, stung by the harsh wind blowing through the open stone arches.

Craig stood on the dais high above me.

He was the Alpha of the Ironfang pack.

He was my fated mate.

His face resembled a mask of carved granite, devoid of any warmth.

The protective fire that usually ignited in his emerald eyes was gone.

A chilling, calculated emptiness had taken its place.

“The bond speaks only of deception,” Craig’s voice boomed through the cavernous space.

The heavy resonance of his alpha command pressed against my chest.

It forced my lungs to constrict until I gasped for air.

He accused me of murdering Dan, our most revered elder.

He claimed I had buried my hunting dagger to the hilt in the old man’s chest.

He produced letters bearing the seal of rogue clans, insisting they were found in my quarters.

The evidence was absolute, yet completely fabricated.

I tried to tell him that Brenda had handed me those exact letters yesterday.

She had claimed they were minor tax disputes from the borderlands.

I told him my dagger had vanished from my private chambers two nights ago.

At the mention of her name, Brenda stepped out from the shadows.

She moved to stand just behind Craig’s heavy oak chair.

She was his beta, his oldest friend, and a woman who had never hidden her disdain for me.

Her golden hair fell in perfect waves over her dark leather armor.

A slow, triumphant smirk played on her lips for a fraction of a second.

She quickly masked it, lowering her head and letting her shoulders tremble.

“It breaks my heart to see how far you have fallen,” Brenda said softly.

Her voice dripped with venom disguised as pity.

She spun a tale about Dan discovering my plot to usurp absolute power.

A murmur of agreement rippled through the gathered pack members.

These were the very people I had spent years healing.

I had delivered their pups and tended their wounds after brutal border skirmishes.

I had fought tooth and nail to ensure our food stores lasted the long winters.

Now they looked at me with bared teeth and eyes full of murder.

I reached out through the ethereal tether connecting my soul to Craig’s.

I begged him silently to feel the truth in my heart.

My spirit slammed against a wall of absolute ice.

He was shutting me out completely.

Then he turned his head and shared a fleeting glance with Brenda.

It was a look of shared, deliberate understanding.

The devastating truth hit me harder than any physical blow.

Craig was not blinded by her lies.

He had orchestrated them.

Dan had been the last elder supporting my family’s ancestral claim to the fertile eastern valleys.

Craig desperately wanted to exploit those lands for iron mining.

I had strictly forbidden the destruction of our sacred hunting grounds.

He needed me out of the way.

“By the laws of our ancestors, treason is met with death,” Craig announced.

His voice echoed with cold finality.

“But because the goddess bound our souls, I will grant you mercy.”

I clutched my chest as a searing heat began to build over my heart.

“I strip you of the title of Luna,” he roared, his eyes flashing wolf gold.

“I reject you as my mate and my equal.”

He severed the bond with brutal force.

The snap felt like a rusted blade shoving between my ribs and twisting violently.

I screamed, the sound tearing my throat raw as my nails clawed hopelessly at the stone.

I collapsed onto the stone floor, my body convulsing uncontrollably.

The glowing silver mark on my collarbone burned fiercely.

It turned a dead, bruised purple before fading into a jagged scar.

My inner wolf wailed in catastrophic grief, curling into a tight ball to die.

“Throw her into the Dreadwood,” Craig commanded, turning his back on my trembling form.

“If the winter does not take her, the rogues will.”

Strong hands grabbed me under the arms.

They dragged my limp, agonizingly heavy body across the rough stones.

The heavy oak doors slammed shut behind me, sealing my fate.

The Dreadwood was a graveyard of ancient pines and jagged, ice-covered ravines.

Sunlight went there to die.

For three weeks, I survived in a state of agonizing living death.

Winter had come early, blanketing the unforgiving terrain in three feet of snow.

Without the warmth of the pack bond, my internal temperature regulation failed.

My human form was too weak to hunt.

My wolf form was too broken to surface.

I subsisted on frozen berries and gnawed on pine bark.

I slept in hollowed-out tree roots to hide from the piercing blizzards.

I woke every morning coughing up blood, frostbite claiming the tips of my fingers.

The physical pain was merely a distraction from the void in my soul.

A rejected mate rarely survived a month before the mind unraveled.

But the stubborn blood of my ancestors refused to let me surrender.

On the twenty-first night, the temperature plummeted drastically.

I was staggering blindly through a whiteout snowstorm.

My legs were entirely numb, and my vision was tunneling into darkness.

I did not hear the crunch of snow behind me until it was too late.

A massive, mangy wolf lunged from the white oblivion.

Its jaws snapped mere inches from my throat.

I threw myself sideways, tumbling violently down a steep embankment.

I crashed into the trunk of a dead oak tree, the wind completely knocked out of me.

Three more feral wolves appeared at the crest of the hill.

Their yellow eyes were feverish with starvation.

I tried to summon my wolf to fight, but only a pathetic whimper echoed in my mind.

As the largest rogue leaped through the air, I simply closed my eyes.

The fatal bite never came.

A deafening roar shattered the howling wind.

The sheer power of the sound vibrated the frozen ground beneath my body.

I opened my eyes and watched a massive shadow intercept the rogue midair.

It was a wolf of monstrous proportions, easily twice the size of any alpha I had ever seen.

His fur was a midnight black that absorbed the faint moonlight.

His eyes burned like liquid hellfire.

With a single, brutal snap of his jaws, he crushed the rogue’s spine.

He dropped the lifeless body and turned his terrifying gaze on the remaining scavengers.

The suffocating pressure of his aura sent them fleeing into the storm.

The giant beast stepped closer, the snow melting instantly beneath his paws.

Intense heat radiated from his massive body.

I was paralyzed by the realization of what stood before me.

The legends were absolutely true.

This was Tyler, the Alpha King of the Crimson Peak.

He was a tyrant warlord who ruled the northern continent with an iron fist.

Whispers claimed he was as cruel as he was cunning.

He shifted seamlessly, standing before me in his human form.

He was unnervingly tall, draped in a heavy cloak of black fur over dark armor.

His face was carved with sharp angles and an aristocratic cruelty.

He looked down at my battered, freezing form with an unreadable expression.

“Megan,” his gravelly baritone commanded absolute obedience.

“You look terrible.”