The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 13

Let them see

(Isla)

Standing up was harder than it should’ve been.

Not because of my ankle. I walked on that every day, had been walking on it for five years through the burn and the soreness, and today was no different from any other day in that regard. It was my legs that weren’t cooperating, stiff from sitting in the same position on the cold floor for hours. I got halfway up and my left leg buckled and I had to catch myself against the wall with one hand to keep from going back down.

I didn’t look at him while it was happening. I didn’t want to see his face.

I got my feet under me properly on the second try and straightened up and stood. My ankle where the chain had been felt strange. Not better exactly, the burn was still there the way it always was, but the weight of the cuff was gone and the absence of it felt so unfamiliar that my body kept expecting to feel it and not finding it. Five years of that weight and now nothing. I didn’t know what to do with nothing.

I stood against the wall and looked at the man across the room.

He hadn’t moved since the other man left. He was still a few feet inside the door with his arms at his sides

and his eyes on me and that expression on his face that I still couldn’t name. He was watching me stand up the way you watched something you were being careful with. Not with pity. Not with the kind of look I was used to getting when I was struggling with something in front of people who enjoyed seeing it. Something else. Something I didn’t have a word for.

I didn’t know what he wanted.

That was the part that was making it hard to think clearly. Every person who’d ever come into this shack had wanted something specific and I’d always been able to work out what it was within the first few seconds. Rodan wanted obedience and fear. Maren wanted humiliation. Torvin wanted to do his job and leave. My father wanted to pretend I wasn’t there even while he was standing in front of me.

This man had taken the chain off. The other man was gone. He was standing in my shack in the middle of a visit that had nothing to do with me and he was looking at me like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at and I couldn’t work out what any of it meant.

I pressed my back against the wall. Old habit. I knew I was doing it. I did it anyway. Some habits were too deep to stop before they started.

“You don’t need to do that,” he said.

His voice was the same as before. Quiet and controlled and somehow heavier than voices that were loud.

I looked at him.

“The wall,” he said. “You don’t need to press against it.”

I made myself stop, made myself stand with my back just touching the wood instead of pushed into it,

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Let them see-

and it took more conscious effort than it should’ve.

He noticed. I could tell he noticed but he didn’t say anything else about it.

He looked at me for a long moment and then he said, “I’m going to carry you across the grounds.”

I went still.

Claim

“There are sixty pack members out there,” he said. “I want them to see you when we come out of this shack. I want them to see exactly how I found you and I want them to understand what that means.” He paused. “I’m not going to touch you without your permission. But I’m asking.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

Nobody had asked me for permission to do anything in five years. The concept of it sat in front of me and I turned it over and couldn’t quite find the edges of it. He was asking. He was standing in my shack with the chain on the floor between us and he was asking me whether he could carry me and waiting for my

answer like it actually mattered what I said.

I looked at the door. At the strip of daylight visible through the gap at the bottom. Beyond that door was the pack house and the training yard and every wolf who’d watched me be whipped and said nothing. My

father. Brent. Vera. Maren in her clean clothes with her hands folded.

He wanted them to see me.

I didn’t fully understand yet what he meant by that or what it was going to look like but something in the way he’d said it made me think that whatever was about to happen outside that door was going to be

different from everything that had come before it.

“Alright,” I said.

He crossed the room toward me and I made myself stay still and not press back into the wall again. He was very large up close, larger than he’d seemed from across the room, and the instinct to make myself smaller was so deep and so automatic that fighting it required actual effort.

He stopped in front of me and crouched down and looked at my ankle the way someone looked at something they were assessing rather than something they were judging. His expression while he looked at it was the same controlled thing it’d been since the doorway but something around his eyes was

different from when he’d first walked in. Tighter. Like something was sitting behind them that he was

choosing not to show.

He straightened back up.

“Put your arms around my neck if you need to,” he said. “Or don’t. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

Then he picked me up.

It was careful and it was considered and at no point did it feel the way being grabbed had always felt, sudden and without warning, designed to remind you that you were smaller and weaker and that the other person could do whatever they wanted. This was different. I felt him adjust his hold when I went rigid and

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