The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 155

This is nice

(Isla)

I kept staring at the spot where he’d been.

Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe I’d built a whole person out of a stranger’s shoulders and a quick turn of his head.

“You went quiet,” Sera said.

I pulled my eyes from the window. “Did I?”

“You did.” She studied me for a second. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I thought I saw someone I knew.”

Sera’s expression shifted slightly. “From Ashcrest?”

I hesitated too long before answering and she caught it.

“Isla.”

“It’s probably nothing,” I said. “I only saw him for a second. The crowd moved.”

She held my gaze a moment longer and then let it go.

The vehicle slowed and stopped and the doors opened and the noise of the settlement rushed in all at once, voices and wheels and something sizzling somewhere close by that smelled like nothing I’d ever smelled before. I forgot about the man almost immediately. Almost.

I stepped out onto the street and just stood there.

People moved around me in every direction, none of them looking twice, none of them lowering their heads or stepping aside the way Wraithbone’s pack did when I walked through it now. Nobody here knew what I was. Nobody here cared.

“You’re staring,” one of the healers said, not bothering to look back at me as she said it, already a few steps ahead.

“I’m allowed to stare,” I said. “I’ve never seen this many people in one place.”

ľ

She didn’t answer that. She just kept walking, talking low to the other healer about something on the other side of the street.

Sera fell into step beside me, though she didn’t slow down for me either. “Bread first,” she said, pointing toward a row of stalls a little further down the street, each one covered with striped fabric that flapped slightly in the wind. “Try to keep up.”

“I’m not arguing with that,” I said.

We walked and the guards stayed close without crowding me. I could feel Caius without trying, present even from however many miles separated us now.

This is nice

wondered what he was doing.

Clam

I thought about reaching for him through the mind link just to check, then decided against it. He’d hear it as worry, and I didn’t want him spending the rest of the morning thinking I needed rescuing from a bread

stall.

The bread stall smelled like nothing I’d smelled in my whole life. The woman behind the stall handed me a piece without being asked and I took it and bit into it and stopped walking entirely.

“Good?” Sera asked, already half turned to say something to one of the healers before I’d even answered.

I didn’t get the chance to.

We bought more than we needed. Caius’s money sat heavy and unfamiliar in the small pouch he’d given me, and every time I handed some of it over for something new, a part of me kept waiting for someone to tell me I wasn’t allowed.

Nobody told me that.

The merchants just took the money and gave me what I’d asked for and moved on to the next person in line.

We moved through the market, stopping at stalls Sera knew, buying supplies for the healers‘ work and stopping for things that had nothing to do with supplies at all. A woman selling small carved wooden animals let me hold a fox for a long moment before I set it back down.

“Buy it or don’t,” Sera said, not really looking at it, already checking something off in her head. “We don’t have all day.”

I looked at the little fox again. Then I handed over the coins before I could talk myself out of it.

Sera didn’t react one way or the other. She just nodded once and moved us along, the healers already a few steps ahead, laughing about something I hadn’t heard.

We kept walking. Somewhere ahead someone was playing a string instrument, singing low under the noise of the crowd. I slowed down without meaning to.

“Of course she wants to stop for this too,” one of the healers said, not quietly enough.

“For a minute,” I said, like I needed to justify it.

We stood at the edge of a small gathering while a man played something slow on an instrument I didn’t recognize. A child sat down right in the dirt in front of him without anyone telling her to move.

Nobody here was afraid of anything.

People argued over prices and laughed too loud and let their children run ahead of them without watching every second for danger.

I’d never had that.

I had it now, a little, standing in a market that didn’t know what I was, listening to a man play music for strangers who tossed him coins because they wanted to.

<This is nice

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