The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 11

The chain breaks–1

(Caius)

Zeron appeared in the doorway within seconds.

He’d been close. I’d known he would be. Eight years of working together had taught him to stay within

earshot when I went somewhere alone on uncertain ground and he’d never once needed me to explain

that expectation to him. He was simply always there when I needed him to be.

He stepped into the shack and stopped.

I watched his face in the moment he took in what was in front of him. Zeron wasn’t a man whose

expression changed easily. I’d seen him receive news of battles, deaths, border crises, and pack

emergencies without his face doing anything more than tightening slightly at the corners. It was one of the things that made him good at his job.

His face changed now.

He looked at the girl in the corner and then he looked at the chain on her ankle and then he looked at me

and I could see him working to put his expression back where it belonged and not quite getting there all

the way.

I didn’t look at him for long. My attention kept going back to her the way a compass needle went back to

north, without choice, without asking permission, simply because that was what it was built to do. She

hadn’t moved since she told me five years. She was still in the corner with her back against the wall and

her eyes moving between me and Zeron with the careful watchful look of someone calculating which

direction the next thing was going to come from.

I crouched down in front of the chain.

It was bolted to a ring in the floor, the ring itself driven deep into the packed dirt and set at some point

with enough force that it hadn’t moved since. The chain ran from the ring to a cuff around her ankle, the

cuff closed with a lock that wasn’t complicated but was solid, the kind that needed a key or the right tool

to open cleanly. The metal was dark with wolfsbane residue, worked into the links themselves, not just

surface contact but embedded in the material so that every hour she wore it she was in contact with it.

I reached for it.

The burn hit my fingers the moment I made contact, immediate and real, running up through my hand and

into my wrist. I could push through it. That wasn’t the question. I’d pushed through worse than wolfsbane

burns and my tolerance as Alpha King was higher than most, high enough that I could hold on far longer

than the average wolf before the damage became something I couldn’t ignore.

The question was the lock.

I could break the chain. Given enough force and enough tolerance for the pain of holding it, I could find a

weak link and break it. But breaking it meant the chain would snap back and the cuff would still be on her

The chain breakes 1

ankle and the cuff was the part sitting directly against the burned skin. Done wrong it could drive the metal harder into the wound before she was free of it arid ! wasn’t going to do that to her.

I let go and straightened up.

Claim

“I need something to break that lock,” I said to Zeron. “Something that won’t require bare hand contact

with the chain. Find it.”

Zeron nodded once and was gone before I finished the sentence.

I turned back to the girl.

She’d watched me touch the chain and pull back and I could see her trying to work out what that meant.

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