The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 43

I was still there

(Isla)

I was in the shack.

Not remembering it. In it. The dirt floor under me and the chain on my ankle and the dark pressing in through the gaps in the walls and Torvin’s boots on the path outside getting closer and I couldn’t move, couldn’t pull the ring from the floor no matter how hard I tried, and the door was opening

and it wasn’t Torvin on the other side it was Rodan with his hands behind his back and that particular expression and I knew what came next I had always known what came next and I

couldn’t.

I came up out of it fast.

Sitting upright in the bed with my hands in front of me and my heart going at a pace that made thinking difficult and the room around me taking several seconds to become real. The window. The eastern forest dark beyond the glass. The fire burned down to almost nothing in the hearth.

The wardrobe against the wall with the clothes inside it that were mine.

Wraithbone. I was in Wraithbone.

I pressed both hands flat against the mattress and I breathed and I told myself what was true. The shack was ash. The chain was gone. Torvin was in Ashcrest. The ring was under burned ground

that I was never going back to.

My hands were shaking.

I was still trying to get my breathing back to something manageable when the knock came at the

door. Two knocks, the same as always.

“Isla.” Sera’s voice, low and calm. “I heard you. Can I come in?”

I looked at the door.

“Yes,” I said. My voice came out rough and smaller than I wanted it to.

She came in with a lamp already lit, which meant she’d been awake or had woken fast, and she crossed to the chair near the bed and sat down and looked at me in the direct assessing way she

had and didn’t say anything immediately. Just looked. Checking.

“I’m alright,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “You will be.”

She stayed. Didn’t reach for me, didn’t try to fix anything, just sat in the chair with the lamp on the

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table beside her and let the room be what it needed to be. After a few minutes my breathing had evened out and my hands had mostly stopped and the dream had receded to the place where dreams went when the waking world had fully reasserted itself.

Then I heard footsteps in the corridor.

Not Torvin’s. I knew that immediately and the knowing settled something in me that the breathing

hadn’t quite finished settling. These were the footsteps I’d learned in the library, in the dining room,

in the corridors of this pack house over the past days. Heavier than anyone else in the building.

Unhurried.

They stopped outside my door.

Sera looked at the door and then at me.

“Do you want him to go?” she said quietly.

I thought about it. I looked at the door and I thought about the fact that he was on the other side of

it and had not knocked and had not spoken and was simply there and I understood that he was

going to stay there or go, whichever I wanted, and was waiting to find out which that was.

“No,” I said.

Sera stood and opened the door and said something to him I couldn’t hear and then slipped out past him and pulled the door to but not fully closed and her footsteps went down the corridor

toward her own room.

“I’m outside,” he said. His voice came through the gap in the door, low and even. “You don’t have to

open it. I’m just here.”

I looked at the gap in the door.

“Alright,” I said.

I heard him settle. The sound of him sitting down against the wall outside, the slight shift of

weight, and then nothing. Just his presence on the other side of the wood, steady and quiet and

not going anywhere.

I lay back against the pillows and looked at the ceiling.

He started talking.

Not about anything specific. Not about me or the dream or Ashcrest or any of the things that lived in the part of my mind the nightmare had come from. He talked about the territory. About a family of deer that had established themselves in the northern section of the forest near the border and that his warriors kept reporting on because they’d never had deer that close to the pack land

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before and nobody could agree on whether they should be moved or left alone. He talked about a dispute between two pack members over the use of a workshop that had been going on for three weeks and had escalated to the point where Zeron had physically separated them twice. He talked

about a section of the eastern fence line that kept needing repair no matter how many times it

was fixed and that he was beginning to suspect had something structural wrong with it rather than anything on the surface.

His voice was the same as it always was. Controlled and even and without performance in it. He wasn’t talking to soothe me. He was just talking, filling the space on the other side of the door with something ordinary and present and real, and the ordinariness of it was the thing that worked

when nothing else might have.

I listened.

My breathing settled the rest of the way. The remnants of the dream, the dirt floor and Rodan’s expression and the ring that wouldn’t move, receded further with each sentence he spoke until

they were where they belonged, behind the waking world and not in front of it.

My hands were still.

I looked at the ceiling and I thought about the fact that he was sitting on the floor in the corridor

outside my door in the middle of the night talking about deer and a workshop dispute and a fence

line because I had woken screaming and he had come and had not asked to be let in and was not

going to ask.

He didn’t ask what I’d dreamed.

I didn’t tell him.

There was a version of this where someone would have asked. Where the asking would have been

dressed up as concern but would really have been the need to know, the need to have access to

the specific contents of what was mine, the need to turn even the worst moments into something

they were part of. I’d known people like that.

He talked about the fence line for another few minutes and then he went quiet and the quiet was

the same as his presence, just there, not demanding anything from it.

“You can go back to your quarters,” I said. “I’m alright.”

A pause.

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