The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 42

What it made her

(Caius)

I was still at my desk when Pryor knocked.

It was late. The pack house had gone quiet around me the way it did after a certain hour, that

particular settling of a large building when most of the people in it had stopped moving. I’d been working through border reports for the past two hours and the fire in the corner of my office had

burned down to something low and steady and I hadn’t bothered to add to it.

Pryor didn’t knock at this hour unless something required it.

“Come in,” I said.

He entered with a folder under his arm, thicker than his usual evening updates, and he set it on my

desk without preamble and looked at me with an expression that was as close to unsettled as

Pryor ever allowed himself to get. He was a man who had worked in council for thirty years and

had seen most things that could be seen in pack politics and administration and very little moved

his face in any direction that wasn’t controlled.

His face was not fully controlled right now.

“The first full report from Ashcrest,” he said. “It arrived an hour ago. I read it before bringing it to

you.”

I looked at him.

“All of it,” he said simply, and left.

I picked up the folder.

Pryor’s work was always thorough. Every finding documented with its source, every claim

supported by either a pack record or a witness account or both. Dates. Names. Specific incidents

laid out in the plain language of formal investigation. No editorializing. Just fact after fact set

down in order, which somehow made it harder to read than anything with emotion in it would have

been. Emotion could be argued with. Facts just sat there.

I read from the beginning.

The wolfsbane chain had been Rodan’s direct order. I’d known that from Drace’s account at Ashcrest. What the report added was the detail I hadn’t had yet. The specific date the order was given, four months after Isla’s fifteenth birthday, following what the records described as a period of behavioral difficulty. The behavioral difficulty, documented in Rodan’s own hand, consisted of

crying and one attempt to remove the floor ring with a piece of broken wall board.

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What it made her

That was what had warranted a wolfsbane chain on a fifteen year old girl.

Crying. And one attempt to free herself.

I set that page down and moved to the next.

+25 Points

Derek Thorne had not simply failed to intervene. The report was clear on that. He had initiated. A

formal written request to Rodan, submitted three weeks before the chain order was given,

requesting what he called a containment measure for his daughter on the grounds that her

wolfless status was affecting pack morale and his family’s standing.

He had used those words. Containment measure.

The language of someone describing a problem with an object, not a person.

His signature was at the bottom of the request. His handwriting. I had seen it at Ashcrest but reading it again here in the full context of everything surrounding it landed differently. He had not been pressured into this. He had not gone along with something Rodan decided. He had asked for it. Weeks before it happened he had sat down and written a formal request for his own daughter to

be chained.

I moved to the next page.

Helene Thorne. The report was careful here, the way Pryor was always careful with evidence that

was more absence than action. She had not requested the chain. Had not participated in any

documented incident of direct abuse. What she had done, consistently and over years, was nothing. The report included a timeline of her movements on the pack land. She had lived within two hundred meters of the shack for five years. There was no record of her ever approaching it. Not once in five years had she walked to the far edge of the land to see her daughter.

Not once.

Maren’s section was longer. Seventeen specific incidents documented. All of it was in Maren’s own records, the kind a person kept when they believed they were managing a situation correctly and wanted evidence of their competence. Those records were now evidence of something else

entirely.

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