The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 17

The man who stopped it–2

I looked at Maren.

Claim

She was at the front of the pack where Rodan had been standing and her face had gone a color I hadn’t seen on it before. Not the pale of shock. Something deeper. The color of a person who has just understood that the thing they thought was protecting them is gone and there is nothing between them

and what comes next.

She was looking at the man in the yard.

Not at me. She hadn’t looked at me once since he carried me out of that shack. I didn’t know what that

meant yet but I filed it away the way I filed everything, carefully, for later.

I looked back at the hole in the wall.

I’d been in this pack for twenty years. I’d been in it from the day I was born and for the first fourteen years of it I’d been a person with a family and a place in things, not a good place, not a warm one, but a place. I’d eaten at the table and slept in the house and done what I was told and hoped that if I was good enough and small enough and quiet enough the thing I could feel building around me would not arrive.

It had arrived anyway. On my fifteenth birthday when I didn’t shift and Rodan made his decision and my father agreed to it and my mother said nothing and I went from being a person with a bad place in things to being something the pack kept at the edge of their land and used and forgot about.

Twenty years.

I’d spent twenty years waiting for someone in this pack to say enough. Not to me. About me. On my behalf. I’d stopped believing it would happen somewhere around year three in the shack. I’d made my peace with it the way you made peace with things that were never going to change. You accepted it and you stopped looking for it and you put your energy into surviving instead of hoping.

And then this man had walked through my door.

He hadn’t known me. Hadn’t known my name or my story or what had been done to me. He’d walked into that shack and seen the chain and done the calculation in about thirty seconds and made a decision that nobody in this pack had been willing to make in five years. He’d taken the chain off. He’d carried me out. And when Rodan opened his mouth to explain it away he’d listened for exactly as long as it took him to

decide he’d heard enough.

One move.

Five years of that chain and one move.

I was aware that I was shaking. Not from cold. My hands were completely still at my sides but somewhere deeper than my hands there was something that had been held very tightly for a very long time and was

not quite sure what to do now that the thing it had been braced against was gone.

The man who stopped !!–2

The marrturned back from looking at the pack and his eyes found mine.

I didn’t look away.

Claim

He looked at me for a moment with that expression I still couldn’t fully read and then he said something to the large man who had appeared beside him, too quiet for me to hear, and the large man nodded and

started moving toward me.

And the man himself turned back toward the hole in the wall.

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