The Rejected True Heiress (Liora and Callum) novel Chapter 540

Callum’s POV

Ambrose’s body hit the dais without its head.

Six hundred people sat there with their mouths open, brains refusing to accept what their eyes had just watched happen. Then, the moment the blood began to pour down the steps, the screaming started, all at once, every row at the same time, and the throne room turned into a stampede.

I stayed exactly where I was, crouched in the gallery with my fingers digging into the rail.

I should have been horrified. A man had just died beneath me, and the sound of his vertebrae snapping liek a carrot in the jaws of that incredible beast was going to live in my head for a long time. But all I could think, staring down at the enormous white wolf standing over what was left of him, was that I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life.

Her wolf was white. After everything they’d called her, everything they’d written on that dress, her wolf had come back as white and gleaming as the palace stone and big enough to tower over everything and everyone. Guests were trampling each other to get to the doors, and she stood in the middle of it all with blood on her muzzle, calm as anything.

Liora turned her head, and the room’s attention turned with it.

Bianca was still pressed against the altar, her cheek streaked red, her hands flat against the stone behind her.

“You think you can contain me?”

The voice came from everywhere all at once. It was Liora’s and yet not Liora’s at the same time, something far more enormous and resonant and eternal, like the voices of a thousand and one queens before her. It rolled out of the wolf’s chest without her jaws ever moving, resonating through the chapel, through the floor, through my ribs where I crouched thirty feet up.

At the sound of that voice, half of the remaining crowd dropped where they stood, heads tilted, necks exposed in submission. I felt the pull of it myself, that command woven into the sound. My head tilted on its own, throat bobbing as I exposed the softest part of myself to it.

An Alpha’s voice. No—more than that. A queen’s.

“I—” Bianca’s voice cracked. She slid along the altar’s edge as Liora stalked toward her, one slow step at a time, claws clicking against the stone. “It wasn’t me. It was Belinda. She planned everything, she made me—I never wanted—”

Liora kept coming.

“Everything that happened at the tournament was her idea!” Bianca’s back hit the wall beside the dais and she flattened herself against it, nowhere left to go. “The spell on the King, Mia, all of it! I’ll tell you everything, I swear it, just—”

Liora roared.

I’d heard it once already tonight, and it still rattled my chest hard enough to shake my heart out of rhythm. The candelabras swayed. Dust sifted down from the rafters around me.

Pride was burning a hole straight through my sternum. That was my mate down there, the girl they’d beaten down to nothing and paraded through a courtyard, standing over this room like a goddess who had finally decided she was done being merciful.

She was so great and terrible and so beautiful it hurt to look at her. Every kingdom told stories about wolves like this. In a hundred years, they’d still be telling this one.

Bianca’s legs folded, and she went down the wall to her knees, and her head dropped to the side, baring the full length of her throat.

Submission. Total, public, undeniable submission, in front of every noble house in the kingdom.

“That’s it,” I breathed.

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