Greymoor Academy: I Accidentally Bonded With Four Lycan Royals! novel Chapter 24

Chapter 24: 24. Soren

"The same crown you have rejected and abandoned," she said, in the tone she had been using on me since I was four years old. "You do not choose whenever it suits you to remember you are the prince and merely owning that title doesn’t mean you deserve it. You have done nothing for your race, other than bury your tool in everything with a skirt and waste away in goblets of wine. I will have no more of your insolence."

Ignoring the anger swelling in my chest, I gave her an amused smile. "And here I thought burying ’my tool’ in whatever woman you chose was my most important duty as a prince."

Her lips pulled thin, and the temperature in the room plummeted. "The Red Moon is in eight weeks."

Of course. It always came down to this.

"I’m aware of when the Red Moon is."

"Then you are aware that the priestess has confirmed the alignment. The conditions are--"

"Optimal," I cut in. "Yes. They’re always optimal, right up until they aren’t, and then there’s another red moon and another alignment and another set of optimal conditions and we do it all again. How many optimal conditions does it take, Aunt? Before we admit that the problem isn’t the timing? And Tessa? Has anyone ever thought to ask her what she wants?"

My aunt’s expression didn’t change. "Tessa knows her duty."

"Tessa knows she has no choice," I said. "There is a difference. A significant one, considering our existence has always been built around the wellbeing of our females. Their pleasure. Their choices." My nostrils flared. "And then we arrange one of them into a Convergence with four men she didn’t choose, scheduled for a mating rite she cannot opt out of, and we tell her it’s her duty." I looked at my aunt directly. "Which is it?"

The Lycan Queen studied me coldly. "Tessa is not a child. There’s not a woman, Lycan, werewolf and human, who would not kill to be your Queen." She took a step forward, until her scent and aura enveloped me. "There are nineteen of us purebreds left, Soren.

"Nineteen. In the whole world. When I was a girl, my mother told me there were forty. When her mother was a girl, there were hundreds." Her jaw clenched. "The lowest birthrates have occurred during my reign, a failure that will be recorded in our fading history. And then I look at you, the best of us, waste what you have been given."

"I am not wasting–"

"Six years of the sacred rituals," she cut in sharply. "And yet, nothing. You and your brothers, the strongest bond I have seen in my lifetime, and nothing." She turned to look at me. "Do you know what the Council says about that? They say it is your resistance. That the Goddess will not bless what you refuse to commit to. That until you take Tessa as your Erasthai in full–mind, body, and bond–the fertility rites will continue to fail."

I froze.

Erasthai.

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