The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 187

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<That’s it then

That’s it then

(Isla)

The response came the following afternoon.

Caius found me in the library and handed me the document without saying anything first. I took it and re

it with him beside me.

Brent had accepted.

Every condition. No objections noted, no requests for amendments, no pushback on any of the restrictions. Just a signature at the bottom of the page in handwriting I recognized from years of watch him sign his name to things in Ashcrest when he thought no one was paying attention.

I read it twice.

Then I folded it and handed it back to Caius.

“That’s it then,” I said.

“That’s it,” he said.

I sat down in the nearest chair and looked out the window. Wolves crossed the grounds in both direction each of them busy with whatever the day had brought. Nothing had changed out there. Nothing looked

different.

Something felt different in me though. Not dramatically. Not the relief I’d half expected or the complicate tangle of feelings I’d been bracing for. Just a settling. The feeling of something that had been unresolved for a very long time finally having an answer attached to it.

Not the answer that undid anything.

Just an answer.

Vaela stirred inside me, quiet and present.

‘Done,’ she said.

‘Yes, I said. ‘Done‘

r

Caius sat across from me and said nothing. He did that well, the not filling silences. I’d appreciated it from the beginning and I appreciated it now.

After a while I looked at him.

“I thought I’d feel more,” I said.

“What did you expect to feel?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something bigger. It feels like it should be bigger.

“It is big,” he said. “It just doesn’t always arrive that way.”

<That’s it then

thought about that.

He was right. The biggest things rarely arrived the way you imagined they would. The mate bond hadn’t arrived the way I’d imagined. The shift hadn’t. The mark hadn’t. They’d all been significant in ways that didn’t look like significance from the outside, quiet and internal and impossible to fully explain to anyon who hadn’t been inside them.

This was the same.

Brent had accepted the terms. He would report regularly. He would stay within the settlement and its immediate area. He would carry the record permanently. He would have no contact with Rodan or Mare or any of the others.

And I would carry what had happened between us for the rest of my life, not as a wound that needed tending, not as something that defined me, just as part of the whole of what I’d lived and survived and come through.

That was what it was.

I looked at Caius.

“Dara,” I said. “She’ll have received her censure by now.”

“Yes,” he said. “Pryor confirmed it was delivered.”

“Did she respond?”

“She acknowledged receipt,” he said. “Nothing beyond that.”

I nodded.

I thought about Dara in the healer’s house, the way she’d stood there and faced us without running, the way she’d answered every question without deflecting. She’d known what was coming and she’d accepte it the way she’d accepted everything, directly and without trying to manage it into something easier.

I hoped the healer let her stay.

“Can we find out?” I asked.

Caius looked at me. “About what?”

“Whether the healer kept her on,” I said. “After the censure was delivered. Whether she’s still there.”

He looked at me for a moment. “You want to know she’s alright.”

“I want to know she has something,” I said. “She gave up everything. I want to know she landed somewhere.”

He nodded once. “I’ll ask Pryor to find out.”

I looked back at the window.

The afternoon was still moving along. Still ordinary. Still entirely unaware that something had just closed inside me that had been open for as long as I could remember

<That’s it then-

thought about the shack.

Not with the weight it used to carry when it arrived in my thoughts. Just as a place. A real place that existed and had contained real things that had happened to a real person. That person was me. Those things had happened. The marks were still there. They always would be.

But the shack wasn’t the last thing anymore.

It was one thing in a longer story that had kept going past it and kept going still.

Vaela was warm inside me.

‘Yes, she said, as if she’d heard the thought.

‘Yes, I said back.

I stood up.

Caius looked at me.

“I’m fine,” I said before he could ask. “I just want to move.”

He stood with me without making it a thing.

We left the library and walked without a destination, through the corridors of the pack house, past wolves who acknowledged us and moved on, through the entrance hall and out the front door and down the step into the afternoon.

I stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked out across the grounds.

The territory welcomed me the way it always did now, not with the curious attention of the first days, but with the settled recognition of something that knew exactly what I was and had decided long ago that I belonged here.

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