The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 146

Exhile and purTTONS-

Exhile and rumors

(Rodan)

+25 Ports

They hadn’t moved us far.

Just outside the Ashcrest border, far enough that we weren’t standing on land that had belonged to my family for generations, close enough that I could still see the tree line I’d walked through every morning fo most of my life. The guards had stopped here to rest the horses before the next stretch of the journey. Nobody had told us where we were going. Nobody needed to.

I knew what waiting for execution looked like.

I sat on the ground with my back against a tree and my wrists in front of me, the cuffs cold against my skin, and I thought about the hall. About Caius standing where I had stood for years and delivering sentence like it was routine. About the word execution landing in the room and the way it had moved through my body before I could stop it.

Not fear.

Not yet.

Something colder than fear. The stillness of a man who has just understood that the thing he thought was still far away has already arrived.

Maren was a few feet away, sitting with her back straight the way she always sat, even now, even with her wrists bound and guards on either side of her. She hadn’t spoken since we left the hall. Neither had Derek, who sat with his head down and his hands loose between his knees, the fight gone out of him completely.

One of the guards said something low to another and they both looked toward the road. A wagon was coming. I watched it without moving.

Vera was crying quietly somewhere behind me. Cole wasn’t making any sound at all. Helene sat beside Derek with her eyes closed, her bound hands resting in her lap.

I looked at my cuffs.

Execution under territorial law.

୮

I had sentenced wolves before. Not often. Not lightly. I understood what the words meant and what they required and I had always believed, when i handed them down, that the situation had called for them. Standing on the receiving end of them was a different thing entirely. The words had weight I hadn’t fully accounted for when they’d belonged to me.

The wagon slowed on the road nearby and the guards began moving, directing everyone to their feet with the efficiency of wolves who had done this before and had no interest in making it harder than it needed to be.

I heard one of the guards mention the Alpha King’s name. Then something about the High Council. The words came in pieces, not meant for me, just two guards talking while they worked.

The High Council was coming to Wraithbone.

<Exhile and unfors

+25 Points

stayed where I was until the guard behind me indicated it was time to move, and I thought about seven wolves traveling toward a territory where a Celestial wolf had just been confirmed as Luna and a completed bond was about to remove every argument anyone had left.

The High Council was coming.

And I was going to a cell.

I stood and walked toward the wagon because there was nothing else left to do, and the cuffs were cold on my wrists and the tree line was behind me and Ashcrest was already becoming something that had belonged to someone else.

The wagon was larger than I expected.

They loaded us in order, the guards efficient and without cruelty, which was its own kind of insult. I had expected anger from them. Satisfaction at minimum. Instead they handled the transfer the way they handled everything under Caius’s command, without expression, without commentary, without any indication that what they were doing was anything other than routine.

I sat across from Maren inside the wagon and she looked at me for the first time since the hall.

Her face had changed.

Not broken. Maren didn’t break easily and I had known that about her since before we were mated. But something in it had shifted in a way I hadn’t seen before, the look of someone who had built their entire life around a position that no longer existed and hadn’t yet worked out what they were without it.

I understood that look.

I was wearing it myself.

“They’ll delay it,” she said quietly. Her voice was low enough that the guards nearest the front of the wagon couldn’t hear her clearly.

I looked at her.

“The execution,” she said. “The High Council arriving changes things. Caius won’t act on it while they’re watching.”

I thought about that.

Γ

She wasn’t wrong. Caius was precise about how things looked to outside observers. An execution carried out while the High Council was en route to Wraithbone would create questions he didn’t need. It would look like he was moving quickly to eliminate opposition before scrutiny arrived. He was too careful for that.

“He’ll wait,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“And while he waits?”

She held my gaze. “Things can change.”

Exhile and unfors

+25 Points

Hooked at my cuffs and then at the wagon walls and then at the tree line moving past the gap in the canvas as we traveled. The territory was already different. I could feel it even through the cuffs, even through everything that had happened in that hall. Something had shifted in Ashcrest itself, the land answering a different authority now, a pack that had just been claimed by someone who outranked everything it had known before.

That was the part I hadn’t fully accounted for.

Isla.

Not the bond. Not the Celestial wolf claim, which I had dismissed as theater until she shifted and the ground responded and even wolves who hadn’t been there could feel what she was when she walked back in. Not even Caius’s certainty about what she was, which I had also dismissed as the blindness of a mated wolf who couldn’t see his mate clearly.

All of it had been real.

That was the thing sitting heaviest in me now, heavier than the execution sentence, heavier than the cuffs, heavier than watching Ashcrest disappear behind us. I had looked at Isla Thorne for years and seen nothing worth accounting for. A wolfless girl. A burden. Something to be managed until it stopped requiring management.

I had been wrong.

Not about her value in the way Caius meant it. Not about what she deserved or didn’t deserve. I had been wrong in the way that cost me everything, the practical calculation of it. I had looked at something significant and decided it wasn’t and built my entire position on that decision and now I was sitting in a wagon in cuffs headed toward a cell while she stood in Wraithbone with a Celestial wolf inside her and the Alpha King’s bond around her and the High Council traveling toward her to confirm what was already

true.

Derek shifted across from me.

He hadn’t spoken since the hall, not since he’d dropped to his knees and said Isla’s name and got nothing back from her. I’d watched that happen and felt something I hadn’t expected. Not sympathy for him. Something closer to recognition. He’d looked at her and finally understood what he’d thrown away and she’d stood there and let him understand it without giving him anything to hold onto.

That was not the girl from the shack.

C

The wagon hit a rut in the road and everyone shifted with it, cuffed hands unable to catch properly, and for a moment the only sound was the creak of the wheels and the horses and Vera’s quiet crying that hadn’t fully stopped since we left the hal!.

Maren was still looking at rne.

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