The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 37

t enough–2

Not enough–2

1 didn’t say anything at the table.

+25 Points

I ate my own meal and I talked with Zeron about the border rotation schedule and I listened to Pryor outline the three items he considered most pressing from the stack that had accumulated while I was at Ashcrest and I gave my answers on each one and I let the meal happen around Isla

without making her the center of it.

She ate one more small piece of bread before the meal ended. That was all.

When she excused herself and left the room I stayed where I was until she was gone and then I told Zeron to send the head of the kitchen to my office in ten minutes.

She arrived in eight.

She was a practical woman who had run my kitchen for six years and who understood that being

summoned to my office was not a social visit and came prepared to listen rather than explain

herself.

“The girl who was at breakfast this morning,” I said.

“Yes, Alpha King.”

“Every night from today I want a tray left outside her room before she goes to sleep. Not a small tray. A proper one. Bread, fruit, something cooked, water. Whatever is being made that evening. Enough that she could make a full meal of it if she chose to.”

The kitchen head nodded without asking why.

“No questions asked when she takes it,” I said. “Nobody tracking what she eats or doesn’t eat.

Nobody commenting on it. Nobody reporting back to me about it. It goes outside her door every

night and what happens to it after that is her business.”

“Understood, Alpha King.”

“If she comes to the kitchen at any hour and asks for anything, she gets it,” I said. “No matter what

time it is. No matter what it is. She doesn’t need to explain herself or justify what she wants. She

asks and it happens.”

“Of course.”

“That’s all,” I said.

She left.

14

112

Not enough–2

+25 Points

I sat back in my chair and looked at the window and thought about a girl who had spent five years being given just enough to survive on and sometimes not even that, who had learned to eat small and carefully and never to assume there would be more, who had sat at my table this morning surrounded by more food than she’d probably seen in years and had taken two small pieces of

bread because she didn’t yet know how to trust that the rest of it was allowed.

The tray outside her door every night was not a solution to that. It was a start. Something that was hers alone, that nobody else ate from and nobody else controlled, that was there every night

without condition and without her having to ask for it or earn it or be grateful for it in any way that

cost her something.

Food that simply existed for her because she existed.

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