The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 24

This isn’t possible–2

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe the bond had misfired somehow. Maybe he’d felt something that wasn’t what he thought it was and he’d made an announcement to sixty pack members

based on a mistake.

I looked at him and he was still looking at me and the thing in his expression was still there, steady and present and not going anywhere, and I thought about the way he’d asked my permission before he touched me, the way he’d given me a second when I went rigid, the way he’d said her name is Isla in that room full of hierarchy members who’d spent five years calling me everything except my name.

Maybe he wasn’t wrong.

The room was still full of pack members processing what they’d just been told. I could feel the shock of it around me without looking directly at any of them. I could feel Maren’s particular stillness somewhere to my left, the kind of stillness that came from someone trying very hard not to react visibly. I could feel the weight of sixty people recalculating everything they thought they knew about this day and what it meant.

My father was somewhere in the back of the room.

I didn’t look for him. I’d looked for him in the yard when Rodan went through the wall and his face had given me nothing and I didn’t need to see it give me nothing again right now.

I kept my eyes on the man at the front of the room.

He looked away from me eventually, back at the pack, and began speaking again, and I listened to him say my mate has been in this pack for twenty years and heard every word of it land in the room like something with real weight, and I stood with my back straight the way I’d decided I was going to stand in this room and I kept my face where I needed it to be.

But the strange feeling in my chest didn’t go away.

It was still there when he dismissed the pack and the room cleared and it was just the three of us left, me and him and the large man who’d been standing near the door the whole time.

I looked at the empty doorway.

Mate. His mate.

I turned the word over again the way I’d been turning it over since he said it and I still couldn’t make it fit the shape of my life, couldn’t make it sit alongside chains and shacks and wolfsbane burns and a father who wouldn’t meet my eyes. Those things and this word

<This isn’t possible–2

+25 Points

belonged to two completely different worlds and I was standing in the place where they’d collided and I didn’t know yet what that meant.

I heard him move and I looked at him.

He was looking at me again. Just looking, the way he’d been looking at me since the shack, like he was waiting for something from me that he wasn’t going to rush.

“Are you alright?” he said.

Nobody in this pack had asked me that in five years.

I opened my mouth and closed it and tried again.

“I don’t have a wolf,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment.

“I know,” he said.

“Then how.”

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But the bond is real. I felt it.” He paused. “Whatever the reason for

it we’ll find out. But the bond is real.”

I looked at him.

He looked back at me and that expression was still there, the one I couldn’t name, steady and present and unlike anything I’d ever been given by anyone in this pack.

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