The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 29

Unlock its ok 29

The road out–2

1 didn’t know for certain that it was him. I had no proof of it and I wasn’t going to ask because

asking felt like the kind of thing that required more words than I had available right now. But nothing happened on this land tonight without his knowledge or his order and the shack/had been standing this morning and now it wasn’t and those two facts sat next to each other in a way that

was hard to look at directly.

I turned away.

Not because I couldn’t look at it. Because I’d looked long enough and there was nothing left there

that I needed to see and the horse under us was moving forward and forward was the only

direction that made any sense right now.

We passed through the tree line and Ashcrest disappeared behind us.

I didn’t look back again.

The forest was dark and quiet around us, the Appalachian trees thick on both sides of the road,

and the horses moved at a pace that was easy and unhurried. The cold was real but the cloak one

of the warriors had given me was warm and the heat of the man behind me kept the worst of it off.

We had been riding for about an hour when one of the warriors moved his horse up alongside ours to report something. He spoke in a low voice and I wasn’t paying close attention to the words, just

the sound of the forest around us, until I heard what he called the man behind me.

Alpha King.

I went very still.

The warrior finished speaking and dropped back and the road went quiet again and I sat there on

the horse and I let those two words settle into me and tried to make them fit against everything

that had happened since the shack door opened.

Alpha King.

Caius Blackthorn.

The man I had been hearing about my whole life in dropped voices and careful words. The man packs surrendered to before he even spoke. The man who had become the most feared ruler in the werewolf world at twenty years old and had held it for eight years without a single successful

challenge.

That was who was sitting behind me.

14

111

173

< The road out–2

+25 Points

That was whose arm was holding the reins on either side of me. Whose horse I was sitting on.

Who had crouched down in the dirt of my shack and reached for my wolfsbane chain and felt the

burn of it without flinching.

I became aware of myself in a way I hadn’t been a minute ago.

My hair was unwashed. I’d done what I could with the water in the room the night before but it was

still tangled and dull and nothing like the way a person’s hair should look. My clothes were the ones

I’d been wearing when he found me, the torn shirt and the oversized trousers held up with cord,

because I had nothing else and he’d told me to leave everything in the shack. The scars on my back were hidden under the cloak but they were there. The burn on my ankle was there. The

bruising on my face that Sera had treated was still visible, she’d told me it would take time to fully

fade.

This was what I looked like sitting in front of the Alpha King.

I stared at the road ahead and said nothing and tried not to think about it too hard but the thought had arrived and it wasn’t going anywhere. Every story I’d ever heard about Caius Blackthorn had described a man who commanded the most powerful pack in the territory, who was surrounded

by the strongest wolves alive, who had never in eight years of ruling shown particular interest in anyone or anything beyond the running of his kingdom.

And he had walked into my shack.

And he had said I was his mate.

And now I was sitting in front of him on his horse with tangled hair and borrowed clothes and a burned ankle and I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with any of that.

The road kept going.

He didn’t say anything.

I pulled the cloak a little closer and kept my eyes forward and tried to breathe normally and told myself that whatever came next it was still better than the chain.

It was still better than the chain.

I held onto that and let the horse carry us through the dark forest toward a place I’d never been and tried to believe that the road ahead was going somewhere worth going.

Comments