The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 168

Find out first

(Isla)

I sat with it for a long time after Calus finished talking.

Not because I didn’t understand it. Because I did, and understanding it was the part that needed sitting

with

Brent was free.

Not because he’d escaped. Not because someone had decided his sentence was too harsh or that what he’d done didn’t warrant what was coming to him. He was free because a woman had felt the bond arrive and had made the only choice she could make in that moment, the same way every wolf who had ever felt the bond had understood on some level that it rearranged everything around itself without asking permission.

I knew what that felt like.

I set the fox down on the table and looked at it without seeing it.

Dara. Twenty six. Three years in the royal guard, a life built inside Wraithbone’s structure, and she’d walked away from all of it in four days. I didn’t know her. I’d never met her. But I understood the shape of the decision she’d made more than I could have explained to anyone who hadn’t felt the bond arrive the way it arrived, sudden and total and entirely indifferent to timing or consequence.

She’d chosen her mate.

I couldn’t find it in me to call that wrong.

What I could find was that Brent’s sentence was still pending and that didn’t change because of who had gotten him out or why. The confession he’d made in that hall wasn’t something a mate bond erased. He’d stood there and said I did it without anyone forcing the words out of him and those words had landed in a room full of witnesses and they were still true regardless of what had happened after.

Caius was watching me from across the room. Not saying anything. Giving me the space to work through it the way he always gave me space to work through things.

“Do you think he told her?” I asked.

Calus looked at me. “Told her what?”

“What he did,” I said. “What he admitted to in the hall. Do you think he told Dara the full truth of it or just enough to let her feel like she knew him?”

Calus was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said.

I thought about that.

It mattered. Not for the sentence, the sentence was what it was regardless, but it mattered for what kind of man Brent was now versus the man he’d been. The man in the hall who had stripped the excuse out of his own words before they could form into something more manageable was a different version of Brent than the one I’d grown up watching. I didn’t know which one had walked into that settlement. I didn’t know

which one Dara had felt the bond with

“I want to know, I said.

Calus looked at me

“When you find them,” I said. “I want to know what he told her.”

“Alright,” he said.

I thought about the market. Standing ten feet from Brent and not flinching. Holding his gaze until he looked away first. I’d filed that moment carefully afterward, not because it wasn’t significant but because I hadn’t wanted it to become the whole of the day.

The market had been full and loud and new in every direction. The Brent moment had been one thing inside all of that.

But it was still there.

It was always going to be there.

He’d put his hands on me. He’d done it knowing what he was doing and not caring what it cost me. He’d said as much in the hall in front of everyone and the words had been stripped of deflection in a way I hadn’t expected from him and still didn’t fully know what to do with.

Vaela stirred inside me.

Not with urgency. Just present, the way she was present when I was working through something that involved more than one answer at once.

‘What do you want from this?‘ she asked.

I thought about it honestly.

Not what I was supposed to want. Not what the right answer looked like from the outside. What I actually wanted when I held the whole of it, Brent free in the settlement, Dara who had given up everything for her mate, a sentence still pending that I had some say in.

‘I want to know if he’s different,‘ I said.

‘Different from what he was, she said.

‘Yes, I said. ‘Not forgiven. Just different.

She was quiet for a moment.

‘Then find out,‘ she said. ‘Before you decide anything else‘

Tlooked at Calus.

“And when you find Brent and Dara,” I said, “I want to be part of whatever happens next. Not told after Part

of it

“I know,” he said.

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