The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 35

Learning the silence–2

My body hadn’t gotten that message yet.

+25 Points

My ankle felt strange without the weight of the cuff. It had felt strange since it was removed but I’d been moving and riding and occupied enough during the day that I hadn’t had to sit with the strangeness of it. Now lying still in the dark with nothing to do but exist in this room my ankle was the most present part of me, the skin still raw and tender, the absence of the metal that had been,

there every night for five years registering as something wrong even though it was right.

1 kept waiting for the sound of boots in the corridor.

Every time the pack house made a sound, a door somewhere down the hall, the natural settling of

a large building in the night, my whole body would go alert in the particular way it had learned to go

alert at certain sounds. Listening for the specific weight and rhythm of Torvin’s walk. Ready to be

still and compliant before the door opened.

The boots never came.

The door never opened.

An hour passed. Maybe more. The fire in the hearth had gone lower and the room was lit only by

the glow of it and the pale light coming through the window from whatever was outside. I stared

at the ceiling and I breathed and I waited and nothing came and slowly, very slowly, my body

started to understand what my mind already knew.

Nobody was coming.

Not tonight. Not tomorrow night. Not any night after that.

I turned onto my side and looked at the window. Through the glass I could see the top of the tree

line where the eastern forest began, the shapes of the oldest trees dark against a sky that had

gone from black to the particular grey that came just before the light started to change. I’d

watched that transition from the shack enough times to know what it looked like. From the shack

it had meant the day was starting and the day meant work and pain and managing every moment

carefully so as not to give anyone a reason to make it worse.

From this window it looked different.

I didn’t know yet what the days here would look like. I didn’t know what was expected of me or

what role I was supposed to fill or how long I was going to be here or what came next in any practical sense. The man, Caius, the Alpha King, had not explained any of that and I had not asked because the day had been too full of other things and asking had always carried risk in my

experience.

E

14

Learning the silence–2

But he had said the room was mine.

He had said there was no price.

+25 Points

He had looked at me in a way that nobody had ever looked at me before and I still didn’t have a

name for what that look was but it was there every time and it had not changed since the first moment he stood in my doorway and went completely still.

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