All Chapters of She Stole My Fate, I Took Her Crown: Chapter 11 - Chapter 15

Lyra ‘s POV I had the den prepare the victory feast exactly as it would have been prepared any other year, and I put my mother in charge of it.She knew where my father was. She knew who was holding him. She carried the keys to the kitchens and the wine cellars around all week with that knowledge sitting behind her eyes, and she never once asked me about it. On the third night she finally came to my chambers and sat on the edge of my bed like she had when I was small."You've won, Lyra. You've beaten a pack nobody could beat." Her hands worked at each other in her lap. "So why does none of it seem to be enough for you? Let it go now. Let me find you a good match, somewhere quiet, and you can stop."Stop. She meant it kindly. She's spent her whole life

Lyra ‘s POV My mother begged for one dinner. Just one, she said, so Selena could sit across from me and prove she'd changed.I knew better before I ever sat down. I went anyway, because refusing would've cost me more with my mother than sitting through it would cost me with Selena.Selena came to the table soft-spoken and small, head bowed the way a properly chastened wolf bows, and she played it well enough that my mother's shoulders finally came down from around her ears for the first time in weeks. She asked after my campaign with wide, careful eyes. She praised the wine I'd sent up from the eastern cellars. She laughed at something my mother said, light and easy, exactly the daughter our mother had spent seventeen years believing she'd raised.Hal

Lyra ‘s POV Three years after the fires at the Moon Goddess Shrine, Lyra Crimson stood before the Council of Elders in the great hall of the Red Moon den and took the crown from Orio Veyl's successor — a young, careful rite-keeper who read the old words without once looking up to meet her eyes.There was no rite of chance this time. No high priest weighing two sisters' names on the old stones and letting the moon decide which daughter lived a life and which one didn't. She had rewritten that rite in her first year on the throne, the same year she'd rewritten a dozen others, and the pack had learned quickly that what the new Alpha King struck down did not come back.They called her Alpha King, not Luna, not Empress, not any of the soft words the old court had built for women who were meant to be held ra