The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 170

Nothing else would do

(Isla)

The settlement looked different with Caius beside me.

Not the place itself. The streets were the same, the noise was the same, the smell of food from the stalls carried the same way it had the first time. But something about moving through it with him changed how it felt. Nobody here knew what we were but they felt something when we passed. People stepped aside without knowing why. Conversations paused for a second and then resumed.

Caius noticed. He didn’t say anything about it.

We’d come without guards this time. His decision, not mine. He’d said two people moved through a settlement without drawing attention. A group did not. I hadn’t argued because he was right and because I didn’t want anything about today to feel like an official visit.

This wasn’t official.

This was mine.

We walked east, away from the market, toward the part of the settlement I hadn’t seen the first time. The streets were quieter here, the buildings closer together, the kind of neighborhood where people lived rather than traded Laundry on lines. Children in doorways. The ordinary texture of lives being lived without anyone watching.

Caius had the address from Pryor’s report. He knew where the healer’s house was. He led without making it look like leading, just moving in the right direction at a pace that didn’t draw attention.

I saw Dara before he did.

She was outside the healer’s house stacking empty crates against the wall, her back to us, her hair pulled back. She was younger than I’d imagined. Something about the word guard had put an older image in my head. She was maybe a year or two older than me at most.

She turned before we reached her.

She saw Caius first. Her face went very still, the way a wolf’s face went still when something significant was standing in front of it and it was deciding what to do. Then she saw me and something shifted in her expression that I didn’t have a word for yet.

She didn’t run.

She stood there with her hands at her sides and looked at us and waited.

“Dara, Caius said.

“Alpha King,” she said. Her voice was calm. Not defiant. Not afraid. Just present.

His eyes moved to me.

I stepped forward.

Tm tala” I said, which she already knew but I said it anyway because it felt right to say it.

“I know who you are,” she said.

“I know you do,” I said. “Tht not here to cause trouble for you. I need to understand some things before any decisions get made. That’s all this is.”

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded once.

“He’s at the trade yard until midday,” she said. “If you want to speak to him you’ll need to wait or go there.”

“Well wait,” I said.

She looked at Caius. He gave nothing back, just stood there and let me handle it the way I’d asked him to let me handle it when we were still in the vehicle on the way here.

“There’s somewhere to sit inside,” Dara said.

We followed her in.

The healer’s house was small and clean and smelled like dried herbs and something medicinal I didn’t recognize. An older woman moved through the back room without looking at us, focused on whatever she was doing, unbothered by visitors. Dara led us to a small table near the front and we sat.

For a moment nobody spoke.

Then I asked her the thing I’d been holding since Caius told me about her.

“Did he tell you?” I asked. “Before you helped him. Did he tell you what he did?”

She held my gaze. “Yes,” she said.

“Everything?”

“Everything,” she said. “He told me before I made any decision. He said I needed to know what I was choosing before I chose it.”

I sat with that.

The man in the Ashcrest hall had stripped the excuse out of his own words in front of sixty wolves. And then he’d done it again in private, to the woman who could have walked away, before she had any reason

to stay.

That wasn’t the Brent I’d grown up with.

“And you chose him anyway.” I said.

“Yes,” she said. Without hesitation. Without apology.

I looked at her for a moment. “I’m not angry at you,” I said. “I want you to know that. What you did to help him, I understand why”

Something moved through her expression. Not relief exactly. Something quieter than that.

“His sentence is still pending,” I said. “That doesn’t change. But how it goes from here depends partly on

what I see today. What I understand

She nodded once.

We sat in the quiet of the healer’s house and waited.

He arrived forty minutes later.

I heard the door before I saw him, the sound of someone whe had been told something significant was waiting and had come anyway without running. He came through the door and stopped when he saw us.

He looked at Caius first, the way everyone looked at Caius first. Then his eyes moved to me.

We looked at each other across the small room.

He was thinner than I remembered. Not from hardship, from work, the kind of thin that came from physical labor and regular meals and a body being used properly for the first time in a while. He looked tired in a way that was different from the exhaustion I’d grown up watching in him. That exhaustion had been the exhaustion of someone who didn’t think about what they were doing. This looked like someone who thought about it all the time.

Dara stood beside him.

He didn’t sit down. Neither did I.

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