The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 22

She is my mate–2

Then the room changed.

+25 Points

Not loudly. Not with words, not immediately. It changed the way a room changed when something landed in it that nobody had prepared for and nobody knew how to process. I watched it move through the pack in a wave, starting at the front with the hierarchy where the shock hit hardest and fastest, and spreading back through the general members behind

them.

Maren’s folded hands came apart. She caught herself and put them back together but they’d come apart and I’d seen it.

Drace looked at the floor. Then at me. Then at Isla. Then back at me, with the expression of a man rapidly recalculating everything he thought he understood about the last five years and not liking where the numbers were landing.

Hadoc went completely still in a different way from before. The stillness of a man who had just understood the full weight of what he’d been complicit in.

Some of the general pack members were less controlled. I saw it in the faces at the back of the room. The ones who hadn’t been directly involved in the decisions, who had just lived their lives and walked past that shack and done nothing. A woman near the center of the group put her hand over her mouth. A man to her left looked at Isla with an expression that was somewhere between disbelief and something that was going to sit with him for a long

time.

And there were others.

The ones whose reaction was not horror at what had been done but something else. The ones whose faces showed a different kind of disbelief, not about the mate bond but about her. About the idea that the Alpha King’s mate was the wolfless girl they’d watched be whipped in this yard. I saw it in three faces clearly and in several others less clearly and I noted every single one.

I let the silence sit for a long moment.

Then I started looking at faces.

Not moving, not speaking, just looking. I took my time. I moved my gaze from face to face at the front of the room and worked my way back and I let every person I looked at understand that I was seeing them and that what I was seeing was going into the same place where everything else I’d gathered today was going.

She is my mate–2

Several people looked at the floor when I reached them.

Several more looked at Isla and then quickly away.

+25 Points

One warrior near the back held my gaze for a moment longer than the others before he thought better of it.

I looked at Rodan last.

He was looking at Isla with an expression I read in about half a second. Not remorse. Not fear of what the mate bond meant for his situation, though that was there too. Something more specific. The expression of a man looking at a mistake he’d made and calculating how bad the consequences were going to be now that the size of the mistake had become clear.

Very bad, I thought. The consequences are going to be very bad.

I looked back at the room.

“My mate has been in this pack for twenty years,” I said. “She’s been in that shack for five. Every person in this room either made decisions that put her there, carried out those decisions, or knew about it and said nothing.” I paused. “There is no version of this where that doesn’t have consequences. The only question is what those consequences look like for each individual person and that is what my investigation is going to determine.”

Nobody spoke.

“Dismissed,” I said.

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