The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 250

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(Isla)

Caius came back to the library an hour after he’d left.

I heard him before I saw him. His footsteps in the corridor had a different quality than when he’d left. Not heavier. More certain. Like someone who had found something worth bringing

back.

He sat down across from me and set Zeron’s letter on the table between us.

I looked at it then at him.

“Tell me,” I said.

He did.

He went through it in the order Zeron had written it. The second dose of wolfsbane administered to Torvin after he was already confined. The Council courier named Cael who had accessed Torvin’s cell in the days before his death and disappeared from every official record shortly after. The payments traced through a third party back to an account connected to a name that hadn’t appeared in any active record for over twenty years.

A name that was supposed to belong to a dead man.

I listened to all of it without interrupting.

When he finished I looked at the letter on the table.

“Cael was the one who administered the second dose,” I said.

“That’s what the evidence suggests,” Caius said.

“And whoever paid him has been operating for decades through people like Cael and Evander without ever appearing directly.”

“Yes,” he said.

I didn’t answer her immediately.

Torvin had found out the chain of command went above Rodan. He’d been getting close to the truth and someone had sent Cael into that cell to make sure he never got close enough to say it out loud. The same network that had kept me hidden for twenty years had silenced the one person who might have exposed it earlier.

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Vaela stirred inside me.

Not with anger. With something colder than anger.

‘He’s been doing this a long time,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Torvin isn’t the first, she said.

I looked at the letter.

425 Ports

She was right. Someone who had been operating for three hundred years and was still operating now hadn’t stayed hidden by being careless. There had been others before Torvin. Others who had gotten too close and been removed before they could speak.

I didn’t say that to Caius yet.

I was still working out what it meant.

“Pryor recognised the name,” Caius said. “It appears in Wraithbone’s older records twice. Both times in correspondence with Alpha Kings before my father.”

I looked at him.

“He’s been watching Wraithbone,” I said.

“Yes,” Caius said. “For a long time.”

“Because of the journals,” I said. “He knew Wraithbone had them. He knew if anyone was going to find the truth it would be the Alpha King who took them seriously.”

Caius looked at me.

“That’s why the Alpha Kings before your father kept the sealed journal,” I said. “They knew someone was watching. They couldn’t stop it but they could leave a record that would survive them.”

“Yes,” Caius said quietly. “I think that’s exactly right.”

I looked at the folded letter from the sealed correspondence. The one that had confirmed the woman who carried me hadn’t given me up willingly. That she’d fought it. That she thought! was dead.

“He told her I died,” I said.

“Yes,” Caius said.

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25 Port

“And then he used Cael and Evander and Rodan to make sure I stayed buried.”

“Yes.”

“But the journal found me anyway,” I said.

Caius was quiet for a moment.

“Yes,” he said. “It did.”

I looked at the shelves.

Somewhere in all of this was a woman who had lost a child three hundred years ago and never stopped carrying that loss. Who had spent however long believing the thing she’d fought to protect hadn’t survived.

I thought about what that felt like.

Not abstractly. I thought about it the way I thought about things that had actually happened to me. The shack. The chain. The years of being told there was nothing inside me worth anything. What it felt like to carry something that heavy without anyone to put it down in

front of.

She’d been carrying something heavier than that.

Vaela was very close inside me.

‘She’s waiting,’ Vaela said. ‘She doesn’t know it but she is.’

‘We’ll find her,’ I said.

‘I know,’ Vaela said. ‘That’s not what I mean.’

I looked at the letter again.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘I mean she never stopped, Vaela said. ‘Whatever he did to her she never stopped.’

I held that for a moment without speaking.

I

Then I looked at Caius.

“I want to find her before he knows we’re looking,” I said.

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