All Chapters of She Stole My Fate, I Took Her Crown: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Lyra ‘s POVThe Cold Plains broke my skin open in three days. Darian offered me a brazier and a warm tent, and I turned both down."There's no princess out here, Uncle. Stop looking for one."He studied me a long moment. "Royal blood or not, this place buries soft women.""Then teach me. Wolf, blade, bow, war-strategy — all of it. From today I'm just another soldier under your command."Something moved behind his eyes. I'd said the very thing he'd come prepared to say to me."Good," he barked, and he was grinning. "Then I'll hold nothing back."He didn't. At dawn we ran the ice, and he drove my wolf out of me over and over until shifting stopped tearing and started singing. Afternoons went to the bow and the blade. Nights went to his annotated war scrolls by low firelight. He'd ordered the garrison to show me no mercy, so they didn't. They picked me for every sparring circle and put me in the snow, again and again.I let them. When the bowstring split my fingers open, I buried my hand

Lyra ‘s POVHaving lost face to me, Selena went looking for a crowd that would hand it back.I came out of my uncle's clan house and found her in the middle of the street, hooded in men's riding leathers, running with that pack of idle highborn sons. She had a great grey borrowed from someone's stable pinned under her will, driving him with the old blood-song the Pact rites teach you, and any wolf with a nose could tell how thin her hold was. The beast fought her the whole way down the road. They cheered her anyway."No she-wolf bends a strange beast like that. You've changed how we see you, Selena."She drank it down and reached for more. She threw her hand out, snapped the grey around, and sent him straight at a child standing frozen in the middle of the road, meaning to run him under and call it sport.Damn her.I didn't care that I stood there in a woman's skirts. I dragged my veil across my face and cut the song out from under her, and the grey came loose all at once. Then I took

Lyra ‘s POVI could have warned Selena. Sat her down, shown her what was coming, saved her from herself.But what right did I have?We'd each been given two lives. We were each spending ours as we saw fit, and that seemed fair enough. In my first life I clawed my way to the highest place a woman of the Red Moon could stand. I meant to use it. I meant to argue my father out of the marriage and walk into his council chamber as myself, and let every daughter born after me see it done once, so they'd know it could be done at all.Then Selena broke the frontier and the stray packs came pouring south, and my father went begging to the Obsidian Apex for rescue. Their terms were simple. Submit as vassals. Ten million in gold. And send us the girl.Everything I'd built in the first half of my life ended there, buried under a wedding veil.She didn't just cut my road out from under me. She cut it for every woman who'd have come after.She's been reborn and she hasn't changed a thing. So why wou

Lyra ‘s POV My uncle put his boot through the table when he heard."They'd feed you to that thing in her place. They don't care if you come back at all." He was already reaching for his sword belt. "We're done waiting, Lyra. Call up every wolf we've got and ride. I'd love to meet the man who tells you to marry."I laughed at him. "Oh, I'll marry."He stopped with his hand on the buckle and stared like I'd started speaking in tongues.I bent over the map of the Red Moon lands and traced the road east with one finger. "We've got soldiers now, Uncle. Tell me what we still don't have."He worked it out slowly. Then his mouth opened. "The pack behind us."

Lyra ‘s POV We'd been promised an escort of royal kin. The Alpha came himself.Sure of his own ground and his own teeth, he brought almost no one with him."Let's have a look at what they've sent me."He handed me down from the carriage, and the second our palms met his whole face changed."What princess has hands like these?"Too late. I turned my wrist and put my blade against his throat."Soft hands can't hold a knife."I gave the word and my bridal train came out of its silk — every attendant armed, every dowry chest open, the whole procession standing as the g