The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 176

The cabin

(Isla)

The cabin was smaller than I expected.

Not in a bad way. In the way that things were smaller than you imagined when the person describing them had spent years filling them with their own solitude. It sat in the clearing like it belonged there, tucked under the pines with the mountains visible beyond the tree line, dark and quiet and entirely separate from everything we’d left behind at the pack house

Caius pushed the door open and stepped aside to let me in first.

I went in and stood for a moment just looking.

One room. A fireplace on the far wall. A table with two chairs. A bed along one side, not large not dressed the way our quarters were dressed, just a bed with plain covers that had been there a long time and showed it. A shelf with a few things on it. A window facing the

mountains.

That was all

I turned to look at Caius.

“You came here alone,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“For how long at a time?”

“A few days usually,” he said.

I looked at the shelf and the table and the single window facing the mountains and thought about something he’d told me a long time ago when I’d asked him to tell me about himself

That he liked the quiet.

Not the absence of noise exactly. The kind of quiet that didn’t ask anything from you

“Is this where you came to think?” I asked.

He looked at me. “Sometimes,” he said. “When the territory needed less and my head needed

more

“Did it help?”

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↑ shift

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< The cabin

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“Usually,” he said. “There’s something about being away from the pack house that made problems easier to see clearly. No one needing decisions. No correspondence waiting. Just the fire and the trees.”

I looked around again. “I understand that now,” I said. “I didn’t before. I used to think being alone was just what happened when nobody wanted you around.”

He looked at me.

“Now I know the difference,” I said.

“I like it,” I said.

Something moved through his expression. “I thought you might.”

He crossed to the fireplace and I watched him build the fire the way he built everything, without wasted movement, without needing to think about it. Within a few minutes the room was catching warmth and the window had gone from black to the dark orange of firelight reflected against glass.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked around while he worked.

Vaela was quiet inside me. Not absent. Just content in the way she’d been content since we shifted and ran through the trees, the ease of a wolf who had been given exactly what she needed without having to ask for it.

I thought about the run.

I’d shifted more times now than I could count on one hand, enough that the change itself had stopped being something I braced for and become something I simply did. But running through the forest at night beside Caius, the two of us moving through the dark between the trees, that had been something different. Not a shift for a purpose. Not a demonstration or a necessity. Just running because the night was there and we were in it and neither of us needed to be anywhere else.

I hadn’t known that was something I was missing until I had it.

Caius finished with the fire and stood and turned to find me watching him.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was thinking about the run.”

He sat beside me on the bed. The fire was building properly now and the room was warmer than it had been a minute ago and outside the pines moved slightly in the wind coming off the mountain.

“You

differently tonight he said

1ooked at him. How?

ke you werent thinking about it he said. “The first few times you shifted you ran like you were still leaming what your legs could do. Tonight you just ran

I thought about that

He was night. I hadn’t been thinking about it. I’d just been in it, in the dark and the cold and the pine smell and the ground under my paws, and none of it had required managing

Is that what it’s supposed to feel like?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly what it’s supposed to feel like

I looked at the fire for a moment.

“I spent so long not having it,” I said. “Sometimes I still catch myself waiting for it to be taken

back

“I know,” he said.

“Does that go away?”

He was quiet for a moment. “I think it gets quieter,” he said. “I don’t know if it goes away completely. But it gets quieter.”

I nodded once.

That was honest and I appreciated honest more than I appreciated reassurance that wasn’t true. The feeling of waiting for it to be taken had gotten quieter since the mating and the mark. Not gone. Quieter.

I lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling

The cabin ceiling was lower than our quarters and had a beam running across it that had darkened with age. I looked at it and listened to the fire and the wind in the pines and thought about the day from beginning to end.

The research on my phone. Vaela’s question. Going to find Caius. The sitting room and the fire and the conversation that had gone somewhere I hadn’t planned for it to go when I walked in.

When are we going to have sex again

I smiled at the ceiling.

alt

ctri

The cabin

I hadn’t planned that. It had just arrived the way things arrived now, without me managing them first, without the checking that used to live between a thought and the speaking of it. it had been in my head and I’d said it and the look on his face had been worth every second of the silence that followed.

“You’re smiling, Caius said.

“I know,” I said.

“About?”

“Earlier,” I said, “In the sitting room.”

A quiet sound from him that wasn’t quite a laugh but was close to one.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “That was the point.”

He lay down beside me and we looked at the ceiling together and the fire burned and the wind moved through the pines outside and the bond between us was warm and easy and entirely without the reaching quality it had carried for so long.

I turned my head to look at him.

He was already looking at me.

The pack house was somewhere behind us, past the trees, past the dark miles of territory that had reached for me before I’d earned it and kept reaching every day since. Pryor was probably still in the office. The formal terms for Brent’s sentence were being drafted and would be ready in a day or two and then that thread would be as resolved as it was going to be for now.

None of it was here.

Here was a cabin under the pines and a fire that had been building for twenty minutes and a man lying beside me who had asked for nothing and given everything and let me arrive at every decision in my own time without once making me feel the cost of the waiting

Vaela stirred inside me.

This is good, she said.

‘Yes, I said. ‘It is.‘

I turned my head to look at Caius.

it

ctri

↑ shift

The cabin

He was already looking at me.

The feeling of waiting for it to be taken was so quiet I could barely find it at all.

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I held his gaze for a moment, then moved first.

I turned onto my side and put my hand on his chest. Warm skin. Slow breath. Real. He stayed still and let me come to him, like he understood that some things mattered more when they were chosen.

1 leaned in and kissed him.

It wasn’t a teasing kiss. Not shy either. Just honest. My mouth on his, my hand sliding up his neck, his hand coming to my waist like it belonged there. He kissed me back at once, and there was nothing rushed in it. Nothing held back either.

I drew back just enough to look at him.

“I meant what I said earlier,” I said.

His hand moved along my side. “I know.”

“I’ve been thinking about it all day.”

A small change came over his face at that, and I liked knowing I could still do that to him.

“Isla.”

Just my name. But the way he said it made heat move through me.

I kissed him again before he could say anything else. This time I moved closer, one leg sliding over his, my body fitting to his without effort. His hand came to my back and held me there. I could feel how much care he was using, and for once I didn’t want care first. I wanted

him.

I took his hand and guided it down.

His eyes stayed on mine.

“Want me to take my time?” he asked.

“No.”

That answer changed something. Not into roughness. Not into force. Just need without restraint.

He rolled over me and braced himself above me for one second, giving me room to change my mind if I wanted to. I didn’t. I reached for him at once, and he came down to kiss me again, deeper now, his hand sliding under my shirt, across my stomach, then higher 1 breathed his name into his mouth and felt him answer with a sound low in his chest.

By the time he pulled my shirt over my head, I was already reaching for his

Clothes became a short problem and then no problem at all

The fire burned in the other room. The cabin felt warm. The bed was small enough that there was no space wasted between us, and I liked that. I liked that there was nowhere else to be nowhere else to look

Calus kissed his way down my throat and across my chest, then lower, and I caught at him because the feel of it was already too much in the best way. He looked up at me once, checking, always checking even when he wanted more

“Yes,” I said.

He didn’t ask again.

When he touched me, I arched at once. My hand went to his hair. My breath caught. He took his time just long enough to make me want more, then gave it. I said his name again, and again, and I could feel him pleased by it, pleased by what he was doing to me

By the time he came back up to kiss me, I was done pretending I had any patience left.

“I need you,” I said.

His forehead touched mine for a second. “I know.”