The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 157

That one

(Isla)

The street opened up past the music stall into something wider, more crowded, the kind of section of the market where everything smelled different every few steps. Roasted meat frorn one direction. Something sweet from another. A woman frying flat bread on a griddle right there in the open air, the sound of it loud and satisfying, the smell stopping me completely.

Sera didn’t notice for a few seconds. Then she turned back.

“That one?” she said.

“That one,” I said.

She didn’t argue. Even the healer who’d been muttering about my pace all morning didn’t say anything, mostly because she’d already bought two of them herself and was working through the second one while pretending she hadn’t.

I handed over the coins and bit into it standing right there on the street and didn’t care what any of them thought about it.

It was the best thing I’d eaten in my entire life. I was aware that might not be saying much given the years I’d spent eating whatever was left after everyone else had finished, but I didn’t think that was the whole explanation. I thought it was just genuinely that good, hot and crisp at the edges and soft in the middle, with something on top I didn’t have a name for that tasted like warmth itself.

Vaela stirred inside me.

‘More,‘ she said.

‘We can’t eat the whole stall,‘ I said.

‘Why not.‘

I didn’t have a good answer for that.

We kept walking. The market stretched further than I’d expected, new sections appearing every time ! thought we’d reached the end of it. Ceramics. Leather goods. A stall selling nothing but different kinds of salt, which seemed strange until Sera stopped and bought four of them without hesitating and I understood that the world contained information I hadn’t had access to yet.

The healers had split off to handle the actual supply run, which meant it was just me and Sera and the two guards moving through the quieter back half of the market at a pace that finally didn’t feel like I was being herded somewhere.

Sera was easier without the others there. Not warm exactly, but less brisk. She pointed things out occasionally, named things I didn’t recognize, answered my questions without the slight edge that had been underneath everything earlier.

I bought a small jar of something amber that the seller said was honey and Sera said was worth it and I took her word for it. I bought a piece of fabric from a woman whose stall smelled like cedar, dark blue and soft enough that I stood there running it through my hands for a full minute before Sera cleared her throat.

That one

“Buy it,” she said.

I bought it.

Claim

The afternoon had moved further along than I’d realized, the light shifting in a way that meant we’d need to head back before long. Twas thinking about that, about the drive back and whether I’d manage it better now that the first one had taught me what to expect, when I turned a corner between two stalls and stopped.

The man was ten feet away.

Not glimpsed this time. Not half a face through a moving crowd. He was standing with his back to me at a produce stall, shoulders I recognized, height I recognized, the particular way he held himself that I’d grown up watching from a distance because getting too close had always carried consequences.

He hadn’t seen me yet.

I didn’t move away.

Vaela lifted inside me, not pushing, just present, the way she got present when something significant was in front of us and she wanted me to know she was there.

The man turned his head to say something to the seller and I saw the line of his jaw and the shape of his nose and all of it added up to the same answer it had added up to through the vehicle window.

Brent.

He looked older. Thinner. He wasn’t wearing anything that marked him as Ashcrest, nothing that announced who he was or where he’d come from. He looked like anyone. He looked like someone who had learned to look like anyone.

He paid the seller and turned to leave and his eyes/found me before I said a word.

He went completely still.

I didn’t move. I didn’t lower my eyes. I didn’t do any of the things I would have done a year ago, the making myself smaller, the looking away, the bracing for what came next. I just stood there and looked at him the way I looked at everything now, directly and without apology, and let him see exactly what was standing in front of him.

(*

His face did something complicated.

Not anger. Not the contempt I’d grown up receiving from him without ever understanding what I’d done to earn it. Something else. Something I didn’t have a clean word for yet, closer to the expression Rodan had worn in the holding chamber when the bow came without his permission.

Recognition.

Not of who I’d been.

Of what I was now.

A few seconds passed. Neither of us spoke. The market moved around us like we weren’t there, strangers stepping between us and past us without any understanding of what was happening in the space between

<That one

two people standing ten feet apart in the middle of a crowd.

Then Brent looked away first.

Charn

He turned and walked into the crowd and disappeared, and I stood there and watched him go and felt Vaela settle back inside me, slow and certain, the particular satisfaction of something that had gone exactly the way it was supposed to go.

Sera appeared at my shoulder.

She looked at the crowd where he’d gone and then at me.

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