The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 131

Because I decided

(Isla)

+25 Points

He answered without hesitating.

That was the part I kept coming back to while I read through the second document. Not the answer itself, though the answer mattered. The fact that he hadn’t needed time to find it. I’d asked something that could have gone several ways and he’d looked at me and given me the cleanest version of the truth without dressing it up or managing it into something easier to

receive.

The moment will be ours.

I turned a page without fully reading what was on it.

I’d been thinking about the mark for longer than I’d admitted to anyone including myself. Not with urgency. Not with the particular fear I used to carry around anything that required me to want something that could be taken back. Just thinking about it the way you thought about something that was coming and needed to be understood before it arrived.

The mark meant permanence.

Not the bond itself, that was already permanent in ways that had nothing to do with ceremony or law. But the mark was something else. It was the difference between a truth that existed between two people and a truth that existed in the world. Visible. Undeniable. Something that every wolf who came near me would feel and understand without being told.

I’d spent my whole life being told what I was.

The mark would tell them something different.

Not because I needed it to. I knew what I was now in a way I hadn’t before Ashcrest, before Vaela, before standing in that hall and watching sixty wolves lower themselves to something they hadn’t expected to find. The mark wasn’t about knowing. It was about something else entirely and I was still working out what that something else was.

Vaela moved inside me.

‘You know what it is,‘ she said.

‘Tell me then,‘ I said.

‘Choice, she said. ‘It’s the first thing you’ve ever been able to give that nobody can take back.‘

< Because I decided

I stared at the document without reading it.

That landed somewhere specific.

+25 Points

Every choice I’d made since Caius walked through my door had mattered because I’d made it. The rules. Sleeping beside him. Riding my own horse out of Ashcrest. Asking to be in the room when the High Council came. All of it chosen. All of it mine. The mark was the same thing in a different form.

Something given because I decided to give it.

Not taken. Not forced. Not extracted by bond or instinct or political pressure.

Given.

I looked up from the document.

Caius was still across the table, working through something of his own, pen moving occasionally. He hadn’t spoken since I went back to reading and he hadn’t looked at me either. Just present the way he was always present, giving me the space to be wherever I was without requiring me to explain it.

I watched him for a moment.

He felt it through the bond. I knew because his pen stopped moving briefly before starting again. He knew I was looking at him and he was letting me look without making it into something that needed to be addressed.

I went back to the document.

Vaela was quiet inside me now. Not absent. Satisfied in the particular way she got satisfied when something had been understood properly. She didn’t push me toward anything. She never did. She simply confirmed things I was already moving toward and waited for me to

arrive at them on my own.

I turned another page.

The High Council was coming in twenty nine days and I was going to be in that room from the beginning and I was going to know exactly who Sorin and Halvon were and how they operated and what they were actually asking when they asked their careful questions. I was going to sit in that room as a Celestial wolf and as Caius’s mate and as someone who had already survived things that made a council meeting look manageable.

And at some point, on my own timeline, I was going to choose the mark.

Not because of them.

Because I decided

Because of me.

Because of what Vaela said.

The first thing I’d ever been able to give that nobody could take back.

I kept reading.

The afternoon came before I finished the documents.

+25 Points

Not because there were too many. Because I read carefully and I didn’t rush through things that needed to be understood properly. By the time I set the last one down the light through the window had shifted and the pack house had changed around us from its morning sounds to its midday ones.

Caius had been in and out of the room through the afternoon. Not interrupting. Just moving the way he moved through a working day, present and purposeful, stopping occasionally to add something to the table or remove something that was no longer needed.

He came back in as I set down the final document.

“Done?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

He sat across from me. “What did you think?”

I looked at the stack of documents. “Sorin is more careful than I expected,” I said. “His rulings are always framed around pack stability but the outcomes consistently favor the

northern bloc.”

“Yes,” he said.

“He’ll frame the mark the same way,” I said. “Territorial stability. The implications of unresolved Celestial wolf status for pack law across the eastern territories.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And I’ll tell him that my status isn’t unresolved,” I said. “It’s simply on my timeline.”

Caius looked at me for a moment.

“That’s exactly right,” he said.

I nodded once and pushed the documents back across the table toward him. “What’s next?”

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