The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 27

No one is innocent

(Caius)

I gave the order that evening.

Every warrior I had with me was assigned a section of the pack to work through. Not just the hierarchy, not just the people who had given the orders or carried them out directly. Everyone. Every wolf who had lived on that land for the past five years and had therefore known. I wanted names, ranks, specific incidents where they could be confirmed, and the role each person had played, whether that role was active cruelty, direct participation, or simply the choice to look the other way every single day for five years and call it none of their business.

I told my warriors to be thorough and I told them that incomplete work would require them to come back and do it again and none of them wanted that. They were thorough.

I spent the hours while they worked going through Ashcrest’s pack records with Pryor. Fourteen years of Rodan’s administration laid out in documents that had clearly never been written with the expectation that anyone outside the pack would read them. People wrote differently when they thought no one important was watching. The records confirmed what Drace had told me and

added detail that Drace had either forgotten or chosen not to volunteer.

By the time the list arrived it was late. The pack house was quiet. Most of Ashcrest’s members had gone to their rooms, not because they wanted to sleep but because being visible felt dangerous and their rooms were the only place that felt marginally safer than anywhere else tonight. I didn’t mind that. I preferred them contained.

I was sitting at the table in the room Rodan used as his office when the warrior brought the list in. He handed it over without a word and I told him to go and eat and rest and he left and I sat alone and opened it.

It was longer than I’d expected.

Not because I’d underestimated Rodan’s pack. I’d known from the moment I walked into that shack that what had been done to Isla hadn’t happened in secret. It had happened in plain sight of sixty wolves who had all made their choices about it every single day. I’d known the list would be long. But knowing something and seeing it written out in full, name after name after name, rank and role and specific incident beside each one, were two different things and the difference between them sat in my chest in the same cold settled way it had been sitting since I first looked at her ankle.

I read every name.

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Rodan first. Then Maren. The chain order, the whipping schedule, the specific dates where the

records showed it had gotten worse. Then Derek Thorne, her father, who had not only failed to protect his daughter but had actively petitioned Rodan for the chain in the first place. The document my warriors had found in Ashcrest’s records had Derek’s signature on it. His request. His handwriting. I read that twice.

Helene Thorne, her mother. No direct participation in the abuse but present in the household for

the years before the shack and present on the land for the five years after. The records showed

she had never once gone to the shack. Not once in five years.

Brent Thorne. The incidents documented against him went back further than the shack. Physical

incidents in the family home before Isla’s fifteenth birthday, before Rodan made his decision, when

she had still been living with her family and he had been old enough to know better and had /

chosen not to be.

Vera Thorne. She had watched. Known. Been present in the household and on the land and had chosen her own comfort over her sister every single day. Silence had its own weight on a list like this and hers was documented clearly enough.

Drace. Hadoc. Dolin. Their roles and their specific failures set out in plain language.

Torvin, the guard. His was different from the others and my warriors had noted that. He had

carried out orders without additional cruelty, no documented incidents of personal violence

beyond the chain itself. That distinction would matter when the time came.

Then the pack members. Name after name after name of wolves who had walked past that shack

every day and gone about their lives. Some of them had direct incidents documented, casual

cruelty, participation in the yard whippings, refusal to provide basic necessities when it had been

within their power to do so. Others had nothing specific beyond the simple fact of their presence

and their silence.

I read to the end of the list.

Then I sat with it.

The fire in the corner of the room had burned down to low and the room was darker than it had

been when I started reading and I hadn’t noticed either of those things happening.

Zeron came in while I was still sitting there. He did that sometimes, came in without knocking

when he judged that waiting outside was less useful than being in the room. I heard him come through the door and I didn’t look up from the list.

He crossed to the desk and I handed it to him without being asked.

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No one is innocent

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He read through it. I watched him read, not his face exactly, just his presence, the way it changed as he moved through the pages. He was quiet the whole way through. When he reached the end

he set it down on the desk between us.

I looked at him then.

Whatever was in my eyes in that moment I wasn’t trying to control or contain it and Vorak was not

helping me contain it either. Eight years of ruling had taught me when to keep everything behind the cord and when the cord had no function anymore because the decision had already been made and what was behind it was simply the reality of what came next.

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