The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 45

The stillness

(Isla)

I woke before the sun came up.

My body had been doing it since before I could remember. In the shack it had been necessary. The hour before Torvin arrived was the only part of the day that belonged to no one else and I had learned to use it. The habit had followed me here even though the reason for it hadn’t and I lay in the bed and looked at the ceiling and listened to the pack house breathe around me.

His voice was still in my head.

Not the words exactly. More the quality of it. The steadiness of his voice on the other side of the door while my hands were still shaking. The fact that he stayed without being asked to and left without being asked to and the space between those two things had been exactly what I needed.

I didn’t know what to do with that either.

I got up.

Not because I needed to. Because lying still when I was already awake felt like something I hadn’t learned yet. My body wanted to move and my hands wanted to be doing something and the room, comfortable as it was, felt smaller when I was just existing in it without purpose.

My ankle was stiff the way it was every morning. The wolfsbane damage didn’t disappear

overnight and Sera had told me it would take time, that the skin needed consistent treatment and

rest to heal properly and that rushing around on it before it was ready would only slow the process down. I slipped on the slippers beside the bed and took the stairs one at a time and by the time I reached the bottom the stiffness had eased to something manageable the way it usually did once I’d been moving for a few minutes.

The kitchen was already occupied when I pushed the door open. Dena, who ran the kitchen with

the quiet authority of someone who had been doing it for a long time, looked up when I came in. The younger staff member beside her looked up too.

Both of them went still for just a moment in the way people went still when something unexpected walked through their door.

“Can I help?” I said.

Dena’s expression moved through something quickly, not unkindness, more the careful calculation of a woman who understood exactly what her position required of her.

“You’re the Alpha King’s mate,” she said. Not harshly. Just plainly. “This kitchen is not your

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The stillness

responsibility.”

+25 Points

“I want to work,” I said. “I’m used to working. I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m not.”

She looked at me for a long moment. I could see her weighing it, the genuine request against the

very clear reality of what would happen if Caius walked into his kitchen and found his mate cutting vegetables at dawn.

“I understand,” she said carefully. “And I mean no disrespect when I say this. But if the Alpha King

found you in here doing my staff’s work I would have a very difficult morning. Please./Go and rest.”

She said it gently. Without making me feel foolish. But the answer was not going to change and we

both knew it.

I nodded and stepped back out into the corridor.

1 stood there for a moment with the kitchen door closed behind me and the pack house quiet

around me and the particular restlessness of a body that had been trained for years to be doing

something at this hour pressing in from every direction.

Sera appeared at the end of the corridor. She was wearing the expression of someone who had

woken early for her own reasons and was mildly surprised to find company. She looked at me

standing outside the kitchen door and then down at my ankle and back up at my face.

“You’re up early,” she said.

“I always am,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment and then nodded toward the small room off the corridor.

“Come and have tea,” she said.

I followed her in and she made tea and we sat across from each other and she looked at me the

way she always looked at me, like she was reading something she hadn’t finished yet.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

I told her what happened.

Sera was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone searching for the right thing to say. The

quiet of a healer recognising something she had seen before in a different form.

“Dena was right to turn you away,” she said. “Not because your wanting to work was wrong.

Because putting you to work in that kitchen would have put her in a very difficult position with the Alpha King and she knew it.”

“I know,” I said. “I understood that.”

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< The stillness

“But it doesn’t fix the problem,” Sera said.

“No,” I said.

She looked at me carefully.

+25 Points

“What you’re feeling is normal,” she said. “For someone who has spent years in a situation where

doing was the only thing that kept bad things from happening the absence of doing feels like

danger. Your body hasn’t learned yet that the danger is gone. That’s not a character flaw. That’s

what prolonged stress does to a person and it takes time to undo.”

I looked at my hands around the cup.

“It feels like waiting for a punishment that hasn’t arrived yet,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “And the only thing that closes that gap is time and evidence. Every morning you wake up here and nothing bad happens is evidence. Every meal that arrives without you having to

earn it is evidence. Your body will catch up eventually. You can’t rush it.”

She looked pointedly at my ankle.

“Same principle applies down there,” she said. “You can’t rush that either.”

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