The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 14

The coming judgement–1

(Caius)

Claim

She was lighter than she should’ve been.

That was the first thing I registered when I picked her up, not as an observation but as something that landed in my chest and stayed there. I’d carried injured warriors off battlefields. I knew what a body felt like when it had been properly fed and kept and maintained the way a living thing was supposed to be maintained. Isla didn’t feel like that. She felt like someone had been taking from her for so long that what was left was only the parts that couldn’t be removed.

She’d gone rigid the moment I touched her. Not surprising. I’d expected it and I’d given her a second before I moved, let her feel that I wasn’t going to grip harder or shift my hold without warning, and by the time I turned toward the door some of the rigidity had eased. Not all of it. Enough.

I carried her through the door and out into the daylight.

The pack was in the yard the way Zeron had arranged them, all sixty members standing in the open ground between the pack house and the outer buildings. The silence when they saw us was immediate and total. I walked out of the tree line carrying a girl that half of them had clearly seen before and the other half had clearly been told not to look at and every single face went still in a different way.

I didn’t look at them yet.

I was looking at Isla.

Up close, in full daylight, she was worse than she’d been in the dim light of the shack. The bruising along her left cheekbone was four days old at least, yellowing at the edges the way deep bruising did when it was starting to fade, which meant there had been something bad enough to leave a mark like that within the past week. Her wrists were thin in a way that made the bones visible when she moved. The tear in the back of her shirt had shown me the marks on her back when she’d been in the corner and out here in the light I could see the edges of them above her collar. Old ones, raised and faded. New ones, not fully

closed.

୮

I kept my face where it needed to be.

That was the work of it right now. Keeping everything I was feeling in the place where it belonged, in the part of me that was going to deal with this pack before I left this territory, not in the part of me that was carrying this girl across the grounds right now. She didn’t need my anger. She needed my control.

Vorak was making the control harder than it had ever been.

I walked across the grounds toward the pack house and the sixty wolves in the yard watched every step and nobody made a sound and I let them look. I wanted them to look. I wanted every single one of them to understand what they were seeing, who this girl was, what had been done to her, and what the fact that

I was the one carrying her meant for all of them.

1/2

The coming jungement!

Claim

Rodan was standing at the front of the assembled pack. He’d come out of the pack house when Zeron

A

gave the order and he was standing with his hands at his sides and his face arranged in an expression that was trying very hard to be composed and not quite getting there. His eyes went to Isla when I came through the tree line and something moved in them that he couldn’t fully control.

Good. He should feel that.

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