The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 34

Vote

*Learning the silence–1

Learning the silence–1

(Isla)

+25 Pointd

Sera left me alone just before midnight.

She had spent the better part of the evening showing me things. The phone and how to turn it on

and what the basic functions did, though most of it went over my head and she’d said not to worry

that someone would sit with me properly tomorrow and go through it all at a slower pace. The

products on the dressing table, what each one was for and how to use it. The wardrobe and where everything was folded and hung. She did it all without rushing me and without making me feel like I/

was supposed to know things I didn’t know and when she finally said goodnight and pulled the

door closed behind her the room went quiet.

I stood in the middle of it.

The fire had burned down to something lower and steadier than it had been when I first came in

but the room was still warm and the warmth was real and present in a way that the cold of the

shack had never fully left my bones no matter what season it was. I stood in the middle of the

room and I breathed it in and I tried to let it be what it was.

I looked at the bed.

I’d been looking at it and then looking away from it all evening, the way you kept returning to

something you weren’t sure was safe to want yet. It was made properly, the covers pulled back on

one side by one of the staff at some point during the evening, an invitation that was so normal and

so foreign at the same time that I didn’t know how to receive it

I was fifteen the last time I slept in a bed.

I remembered the one in the family home. It hadn’t been much, a narrow frame and a thin mattress

and a cover that had seen better days, but it had been mine and I’d slept in it every night for fifteen

years and I hadn’t understood until it was gone what it meant to have something as simple as a

surface that kept you off the floor.

This bed was nothing like that one.

I walked to it and I sat down on the edge carefully, like sitting fully was a permission I hadn’t been

given yet. The mattress took my weight without complaint. The covers where my hand rested

were thick and real and I pressed my fingers into them and felt the give of it.

Nobody was going to take this away.

I said that to myself clearly and plainly and tried to make it land somewhere it would stick. Nobody

14

12

* Learning the silence–1

+25 Points

was going to come through that door and tell me I’d used it wrong or that I’d lost the right to it or that it had never been mine in the first place. The man who had given me this room had said there was no price for it. He had looked at me when he said it in a way that did not leave room for negotiation or conditions and I was starting to understand that when he said something he meant it exactly as he said it, no more and no less.

I took my shoes off.

That was the first step. I set them beside the bed and I sat there for a moment and then I swung my legs up and I lay down and I pulled the cover over myself and I lay on my back and I looked at the ceiling.

The ceiling was solid. No holes. No cloth stuffed into gaps. No sound of wind coming through cracks in the walls because there were no cracks. The room was quiet in the way rooms were quiet when they were properly built, not the forced quiet of the shack where the silence had always felt like it was waiting for something to break it.

This quiet just was.

I lay in it and I waited for Torvin.

I knew he wasn’t coming. I knew that with the part of my mind that understood facts and processed information and knew perfectly well that Torvin was in Ashcrest and I was in Wraithbone and there was a full day’s ride between those two places and no chain in this room and nothing attached to the floor.

2

Comments

14