The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 40

+25 Points

Before thought

(Caius)

It happened in the library.

Three days after we returned from Ashcrest Isla had started moving through the pack house with

a little more ease. Not much. She still mapped every room before she settled in it and she still kept her back to walls where she could and she still ate carefully and not enough at the main table. But she was moving. Exploring in the quiet way she did everything, a little further each day, like she

was testing the edges of how much space she was allowed to take up.

She hadn’t heard me come in. She was standing at the shelves along the far wall looking at the books with the particular expression she had when she was interested in something but wasn’t sure yet whether being interested was permitted. I watched her from the doorway for a moment before I crossed to the table near the window. By the time I reached it she’d turned and seen me and her expression had shifted into the more careful version she wore when she knew she was being observed.

“You can take any of them,” I said, nodding at the shelves.

She looked at the books and then back at me.

“Any of them,” I said again, because I could see she wasn’t sure I meant it.

She turned back to the shelves. I went to the table where I’d left a document Pryor had given me that morning, the latest report from the Ashcrest investigation, picked it up and read through it standing up. We were in the same room without either of us making it into something that needed to be navigated and that was progress of a kind I hadn’t been sure would come this quickly.

When I finished reading I set the document down and reached past her for the pen I’d left on the shelf beside her.

She flinched.

Not a small movement. Her whole body went in one direction, away from my arm, fast and without any decision behind it, the pure automatic response of someone whose nervous system had been trained by years of things coming at them from the side. She caught herself almost immediately, went still, and I saw the moment she realised what she’d done. The particular expression that followed told me everything, something between embarrassment and the bracing of someone waiting to find out what the flinch was going to cost them.

I stopped.

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Before thought

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Did not finish reaching for the pen. Did not move toward her or away from her. Simply stopped with my arm where it was for one second, then brought it back, took one step back, put space between

1. us. Said nothing.

She said nothing either.

We were both still for a moment that was longer than it needed to be and shorter than it felt.

Then I reached for the pen again, from a different angle this time, making sure she could see

exactly where my arm was going before it moved. Picked it up. Stepped back to the table. Made a

note on the document. Did not look at her while I did it because looking at her in that moment felt

like one more thing pressing in on her.

After a minute she turned back to the shelves.

After another minute she took a book.

I stayed at the table until I’d finished making my notes. Then I told her the evening meal was in an

hour if she wanted it and I left the library and walked back to my office and closed the door behind

1. me.

She flinched, Vorak said the moment the door was closed..

‘I know,‘ I said. ‘I was there.‘

‘From us,‘ he said. ‘She flinched from us.”

‘She flinched from an arm that came toward her without warning, I said. ‘That arm has hurt her

before. Ours hasn’t. She doesn’t know the difference yet.‘

Vorak went quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of acceptance. The quiet of something large sitting

very still because moving wasn’t going to help anything right now and he knew it even if he didn’t

like it.

‘She will, he said finally.

‘Yes, I said. ‘She will.’

I sat down at my desk and put both hands flat on the surface and breathed. Eight years of ruling had required patience in situations that demanded it and I had built that patience deliberately, the same way I’d built everything else, through necessity and through understanding that the alternative was always worse.

This required more of it than anything had before.

She had flinched from my arm. Not because of anything I’d done. The flinch had nothing to do with me specifically and everything to do with what had been done to her since childhood by people

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who had moved their arms in her direction for reasons that were never good. Her body had

learned what an arm coming toward it meant. The fact that this particular arm had no intention of

hurting her was information her nervous system hadn’t yet received and couldn’t simply be told.

You couldn’t tell a body something like that.

You had to show it, repeatedly and over time, until the evidence accumulated into something the

body believed. Until every arm that came toward her had come and gone without pain/often

enough that the response changed. That was going to take time.

‘How much time?‘ Vorak asked.

‘As much as she needs,‘ I said.

He didn’t argue with that. He understood it even if the waiting cost him something.

She came to the evening meal. Ate slightly more than usual. I noted that without commenting on it

and kept the conversation at the table away from anything that required her to participate if she

didn’t want to.

Later, alone in my office, I thought about the list.

Not for the first time that day. The list had become a fixed point I returned to regularly, not

because I needed to review it but because it grounded something in me that needed grounding.

Every person on it had contributed to the girl who flinched in my library. Every raised hand, every

word used as a weapon, every choice made over her whole life to treat a person as something less

than what she was had built the response her body produced when my arm moved toward her

from the side.

They had done that.

I was the one watching the result of it.

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