The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 44

Unlock its ok 4

The path is set

(Caius)

I walked back to my quarters and closed the door behind me.

+25 Points

I stood in the dark and said nothing and let Vorak do what he was going to do because there was

no stopping him and fighting it would only make both of us worse.

He was pushing hard.

Not the slow grinding pressure he’d maintained since the shack. This was sharper More directed.

The particular kind of pushing that came when he felt something had gone wrong and wanted to

fix it and couldn’t and was making me aware of that at full volume.

‘We should go back, he said.

‘No,‘ I said.

‘She was screaming, Caius.‘

‘I know.‘

‘She’s alone in there.‘

‘She needed the space,‘ I said. ‘So I gave it to her.‘

He pushed again and I let it move through me without responding to it and after a moment it

eased back slightly. Not gone. Just contained, the way a fire was contained when you stopped

feeding it without putting it out.

I put my fist through the wall.

Not a decision. My hand was in the plaster before I’d registered I was going to move and the wall

gave and the pain arrived immediately, real and grounding, pulling everything to a single physical

point.

I stood there for a moment.

Then I pulled my hand out and looked at it.

The knuckles were split and two of them had already started to colour. The healing warmth moved through almost immediately, the particular sensation of a wolf’s body doing what it was built to do. Within minutes the splits were closing. Within the hour there would be nothing left to show.

‘Feel better?‘ Vorak asked.

14

1/4

The path is set ‘No,‘ I said.

‘No,’ he agreed.

+25 Points

I closed my hand and opened it and watched the last of the damage disappear and then I crossed

to the window and looked out at the territory in the dark.

The training grounds were empty. The tree line of the eastern forest was visible from here and

stood and looked at it and thought about the fact that she could see the same trees from her

window on the other side of the pack house. Different angle. Same forest. We were on opposite

ends of the building looking at the same thing and I was standing here with a healing hand and a

hole in the wall behind me and she was hopefully, finally, asleep.

‘She’s still going back there when she closes her eyes, Vorak said. His voice had lost the pushing

quality. It was quieter now. More like thinking out loud.

‘I know,‘ I said.

‘The shack is ash. The chain is gone. Torvin is in Ashcrest under investigation. And she’s still there

in her sleep.’

That’s not something a burned shack fixes,‘ I said. ‘That’s something time fixes. And evidence.

Consistent evidence that the world she’s in now operates differently from the one she came from.

‘We’re providing that.‘

‘We’re starting to, I said. ‘It’s been days, Vorak. Not months. Not years. Days.’

He was quiet for a moment.

‘It costs something,‘ he said. ‘Watching her and not being able to fix it faster.’

‘Yes, I said. ‘It does.‘

‘Every time she flinches. Every time she eats like someone is going to take the food away. Every time she waits for something bad to happen and it doesn’t and she still can’t fully believe it won’t.

‘Every time, I said. ‘That’s what this is. That’s what it costs.

He went quiet after that. The frustrated energy was still there but it had changed shape, from pushing outward to something more internal, the kind of quiet that came from understanding

something you didn’t want to have to understand.

I turned away from the window.

The report from Ashcrest was locked in my desk downstairs. Every page. Every name. I’d read it twice and made my notes and locked it away and the contents of it were sitting in me the way they

14

O

244

The path is set

+25 Points

had been since Pryor set the folder on my desk and looked at me with that expression and said all

of it and left.

That report was the source of what she dreamed.

Not directly. Not in the way that a single event was a source. In the accumulated way, page after page of decisions made about her by people who had the power to make them, building something in her over years that now lived in her sleep and woke her screaming in a room that was

warm and safe and hers.

I was going to use every page of it.

When the time came and the case was complete and Isla was ready I was going to take it back to

Ashcrest and stand in the yard where she had been whipped and read it out loud in full in front of

every wolf who had been there. Every name. Every specific incident. Every signature at the bottom

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify