The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 41

No price

(Isla)

He left the library and I stayed where I was.

+25 Points

The book was still in my hands. I hadn’t moved since he walked out and I wasn’t sure how long I’d been standing there but the light through the window had shifted slightly and the room had gone a shade quieter the way rooms did when the person who carried the most weight in them was no longer present.

I put the book back on the shelf.

Not because I didn’t want it. Because I needed something to do with my hands that wasn’t standing very still trying to understand what had just happened in this room.

He had reached past me. My body had reacted. He had stepped back, said nothing, adjusted his approach without announcing that he was adjusting it, finished what he came to do and left. Four

things. Simple and sequential and none of them had cost me anything and yet I was standing here turning them over like there was something in them I hadn’t found yet.

There wasn’t. That was the thing I couldn’t land on.

There was nothing in it. No hidden layer. No moment where he had noted what my body did and filed it away for later. He had simply responded to what was happening in front of him in the most practical and least damaging way available and then moved on.

I walked to the window and looked out at the grounds.

A few warriors were finishing up a late session on the training yard, moving across the grass toward the outer buildings. The sky above the tree line was going from pale to dark. Normal. Everything out there was just going about its evening and nothing in it knew or cared that I was standing in a library trying to understand a man who kept giving me things without asking for anything back.

That was what I couldn’t make fit.

The giving without the asking. Every version of kindness I had known had a structure to it. Something offered, something expected, something eventually due. Even the smallest things. The pack member who’d occasionally left extra food near the kitchen entrance had done it in a way that made sure I knew who left it, which meant it wasn’t really about the food. It was about being seen as the person who left it. There was always a reason underneath. Always something the kindness was working toward.

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<< No price

+25 Points

I had been here long enough to be past the point where a reason should still be hidden if there was was

one.

Caius had said the room was mine with no price attached. The food appeared outside my door

every night and nobody tracked whether I took it. Zeron had shown me the grounds and when I’d

asked him directly why he was helping he’d answered directly and then left. Sera treated my ankle

and talked to me like a person and came back two days later and did it again.

None of it had turned into anything yet.

I pressed my hand against the cold glass of the window and looked at my own reflection and thought about that.

The waiting was the exhausting part. Not the place itself. Not the people in it. The constant low

level alertness of waiting for the shape of things to shift, for the moment when the room changed

and something was required of me that I hadn’t agreed to. I’d been doing it since the shack door

opened and Caius walked through it and I hadn’t been able to stop doing it since because stopping

felt like the most dangerous thing I could do.

But the shift wasn’t coming.

Every time I braced for it nothing happened. Every time I expected the kindness to turn into

something with edges it stayed round. Every time I waited for him specifically to show me the

price he’d decided on, some demand that matched the scale of what he’d given, he simply came

into the same room as me and existed there without requiring anything and then left.

I didn’t have a framework for that.

I had frameworks for cruelty and for transaction and for the particular kind of tolerance that was

really just controlled contempt and for silence that meant danger was coming. I didn’t have one for

a person who was simply near me without agenda.

It made me careful in a different way than I was used to being careful.

Not careful like watching for the next blow. Careful like someone handling something unfamiliar,

something that might be valuable, moving slowly because moving fast risked breaking something

I didn’t know how to replace.

I turned away from the window.

The library was quiet around me and the shelves were full and the chair by the window had a

cushion on it and somewhere down the corridor the pack house was going about its evening and in about an hour there would be food on a table and nobody at that table would ask me to justify

how much I took.

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2/3

O

< No price

I picked the book back up from the shelf.

Opened it. Found the page.

+25 Points

I didn’t know yet what to do with a person who gave without asking. Didn’t know what it meant or

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