The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 12

The chain breaks–2

“Isla,” I said.

I said it once and didn’t say anything after it. I wasn’t going to make promises to her right now. Promises made in the first five minutes by a stranger who’d walked into her shack weren’t going to mean anything to a girl who’d lived in this room for five years. Words were cheap and she’d know that better than most. What I could do was stay where I was and not move toward her and not raise my voice and let her see that nothing bad was coming from my direction.

Vorak, my wolf, wasn’t making that easy.

He’d been screaming since the moment the bond hit me in the doorway and he hadn’t stopped. Not the way he screamed before a fight, that was a focused and directed thing. This was different. This was something without a clear target, a reaction to what he was seeing and smelling and understanding about this room and the girl in it and how long she’d been here and what that had cost her, and the only direction I could point him in right now was at Rodan and his pack and I needed to keep that contained until I had

Isla out of here.

I looked at the ring in the floor. The bolt was deep. Someone had put real effort into making sure it couldn’t be pulled loose. I thought about who had crouched down in this same spot and driven that bolt in and made sure it would hold and I filed that thought away in the part of my mind where I was keeping

everything I was going to come back to when the time was right.

Zeron came back through the door with two of my warriors behind him. One of them was carrying a heavy

bolt cutter from the saddlebag kit we traveled with, the kind used for cutting through chain link in border

situations. The other had thick leather work gloves, the kind that were lined and reinforced, not perfect protection against wolfsbane contact but enough to handle the chain without immediate damage.

“The lock first,” I said. “Not the chain. Get the cuff off her ankle as cleanly as you can.”

Zeron pulled the gloves on and crouched in front of Isla. He looked up at her before he touched anything.

“I’m going to get this off you,” he said. His voice was different from the one he used with me. Quieter. More careful. “I’m going to be as careful as I can. Tell me if I need to stop.”

She looked at him. Something in her face moved at being spoken to that way. There and gone quickly, the way things moved across her face when she was trying not to show them.

She gave a small nod.

Zeron positioned the bolt cutter against the lock and looked up at me once. I nodded. He pressed down

and the lock gave with a sound that was much smaller than the size of the thing that’d been keeping her in

place deserved.

The cuff came open.

Zeron eased it away from her ankle carefully and set it on the floor and the chain went with it, the whole

1/2

The chain breaks–2

Claim

length of it going slack against the dirt, and for the first time in five years the ring in the floor had nothing

attached to it.

I looked at Isla’s ankle where the cuff had been. The skin was raw and burned in a ring that told me exactly how long and how consistently that contact had been maintained.

Vorak went very quiet in a way that wasn’t calm.

I looked at Zeron.

I

“Go and find Rodan,” I said. “Tell him to gather his pack in the yard. Everyone. Now.”

Zeron stood, read my face, and left without a word.

I looked back at Isla.

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