The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 47

I saw him

(Isla)

He left when the fire burned low.

Not abruptly. He stood, said goodnight, and walked out and pulled the door behind him and his

footsteps went down the corridor the same way they always did, unhurried and without looking

back. I sat by the window for a while after he was gone and looked at the chair he’d been sitting in

and thought about the conversation we’d just had.

He’d asked me what I liked.

Nobody had ever asked me that before. Not once in twenty years. The question had sat in front of

me like something I didn’t have the right equipment to answer and I’d given him the only honest

thing I had, rain through a door that wasn’t leaking, and he had listened like it was worth listening

to and said it was enough and meant it.

I picked up the book from my lap and set it on the table beside me.

Caius Blackthorn.

I had grown up hearing that name the way you heard weather warnings, something coming from a

distance that you needed to be aware of and prepared for. The stories weren’t exaggerations. I’d

seen the evidence of them myself. I’d watched him walk into Ashcrest and the entire pack go

silent before he said a single word. I’d watched him hit Rodan so hard the wall gave way and then

stand in the yard afterward and address sixty wolves in a voice that never once rose above

conversational and hold every single one of them in place with it.

He was exactly what they said he was.

And he was also the man who knocked on my door and waited and sat in the chair across the

room and asked me what I liked.

I couldn’t make those two things fit together and I had been trying since the shack.

Power in Ashcrest had always looked the same. It looked like Rodan’s hands behind his back and that particular expression. It looked like Maren’s folded hands and the satisfaction she took in having something you needed and deciding whether to give it. Power in Ashcrest was always pointed at something smaller than itself and the pointing was the point.

Caius had power that made everything I’d seen in Ashcrest look like a child’s version of the real thing.

And he pointed it away from me.

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Every time. Consistently and without making a performance of it. The step back in the library. The door opened slowly. The chair across the room instead of closer. The knock and the waiting. All of it was a choice and he was making it every time with the same consistency that he brought to

everything else.

I kept looking for the calculation underneath it.

Every version of careful I had known before had something underneath it that had nothing to do

with me. Torvin had been careful with the chain because a damaged ankle made me less useful.

The occasional pack member who had been less cruel than the rest had been careful because

cruelty reflected badly on them or because they wanted something from the situation later.

His careful had me at the center of it.

Not as a problem to manage. As a person whose choices were worth accounting for on their own

terms. I kept looking for what was underneath that and I kept finding nothing and the nothing was

the most disorienting thing about this place.

I thought about what he’d said tonight.

Every person who came through a door toward you came without warning and without asking.

He had noticed that and named it and decided to do something different because of it. Not

because someone told him to. Because he had looked at the shape of my experience and

understood what it meant and adjusted without being asked.

I looked at the window.

The eastern forest was dark outside and the pack house was quiet around me and somewhere at

the other end of the building the Alpha King was presumably going about his evening. Working or

reading or simply existing in his own space the way I was existing in mine.

I thought about what he’d said he liked quietly.

Sitting in a room where nothing was required of either of them.

The most powerful wolf alive had just told me that what he liked quietly was sitting in a room doing nothing with me. I turned that over once and then put it down because looking at it directly

for too long felt like something I wasn’t ready for yet,

I stood up from the window.

My ankle was better in the evenings than mornings and I walked to the bed without difficulty and

sat on the edge and looked at the fire.

Tomorrow he would probably be in the library or somewhere in the pack house I had access to and

E

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I would see him again and he would be both of those things at once, the man who sent Rodan through a wall and the man who waited outside doors. Both real. Both him.

Maybe that was the point.

Maybe they weren’t two versions that needed reconciling. Maybe power used against people who deserved it and care given to the one person he’d decided deserved something different were not

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