The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 23

This isn’t possible–1

(Isla)

I heard the words clearly.

The room was quiet enough that there was no possibility of mishearing them. He’d said them plainly, without hesitation, without any of the careful packaging that people used when they were saying something they weren’t sure of. Just the words, flat and direct, the same way he said everything.

Isla is my mate.

I stood where I was and I let the words sit in front of me and I tried to make sense of them.

Mate bonds were something I knew about the way I knew about most things in pack life, from the outside, from watching other people experience them, from listening to conversations I wasn’t supposed to be part of. I knew what they were. The pull between two wolves whose animals recognised each other. The bond that formed when two people were meant to be paired, deep and permanent and not something that could be chosen or refused

once it arrived.

Two wolves.

I looked down at my hands.

I didn’t have a wolf. I’d never had a wolf. I’d stood in this pack’s yard on my fifteenth birthday and waited and nothing had come and Rodan had looked at my father and my father had looked at the ground and that had been the beginning of everything that came after. Wolfless. That was what I was. That was what I’d been told I was every day for five years in ways that ranged from words to chains.

How could I be anyone’s mate?

I looked up.

He was already looking at me.

He’d been looking at me, I realised, since the moment he’d said it. Not at the pack, not at Rodan, not at the room full of shocked faces that were still trying to process what they’d just heard. At me. Like the rest of the room had stopped being relevant the moment the words were out and I was the only thing left worth looking at.

I didn’t know what to do with that.

<This isn’t possible–1

+25 Points

I’d been looked at in this pack my whole life. I knew every kind of look that existed in it. Rodan’s look that said you are mine to do with as I please. Maren’s look that said you are beneath my notice except when you are useful to my cruelty. My father’s look that said I have decided not to see you. Brent’s look that said I am going to enjoy this. Vera’s look that said I see you but looking away is easier than doing anything about it.

This was not any of those looks.

It wasn’t pity either. I’d seen pity before, from the occasional pack member who hadn’t entirely lost whatever was left of their conscience, and it always had a particular quality to it, a distance, a relief that the person feeling it was not in the position they were pitying. This didn’t have that distance. There was no relief in it. Whatever he was feeling when he looked

at me he was feeling it straight on without any buffer between him and it.

It wasn’t cruelty. It wasn’t indifference. It wasn’t the particular blankness of someone who had decided I wasn’t worth the energy of a real expression.

I couldn’t name what it was.

That was the thing that made my chest feel strange. Not the words, not the announcement in front of sixty pack members, not the shock moving through the room in a wave I could feel

even from where I was standing. The look. The fact that I was standing in the same room

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