The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 48

The bond is real

+25 Points

The bond is real

(Caius)

I found her in the library the next morning.

She was in the chair by the window with a book open in her lap and she looked up when I came in

the way she always looked up, that quick assessment that had become familiar to me now, reading the room before deciding how to be in it.

I knocked on the open door.

She almost smiled at that.

“You can come in,” she said.

I crossed to the chair across from her and sat and she watched me settle and waited to find out

what I was there for. She had gotten better at waiting without bracing. Not all the way. But better.

“I want to talk to you about the bond,” I said.

She went still in the particular way she went still when something landed that she needed a

moment with.

“Alright,” she said.

I looked at her directly because this was not a conversation that deserved anything less than that.

“It’s real,” I said. “What I felt when I found you in the shack. It wasn’t something I manufactured or

decided or chose. It arrived the moment I walked through that door and it hasn’t changed since.” I

paused. “You’ll feel it too if you don’t already. Wolf or no wolf. The bond doesn’t require a shift to

exist. It’s older than that.”

She looked at her hands in her lap.

“I feel something,” she said carefully. “I don’t know what to call it.”

“You don’t have to call it anything yet,” I said.

She looked up at me.

“What does it mean?” she said. “Practically. What does it require?”

“Nothing that you don’t choose,” I said. “That’s what I want you to understand clearly. The bond exists. It will keep existing whether we act on it or not. But nothing happens between us because of it. Nothing happens that you don’t decide on your own terms.”

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She was quiet for a moment.

“Most mates don’t work like that,” she said.

“No,” I said.

+25 Points

“The bond pulls,” she said. “I know enough about how it works to know it pulls toward completion. Toward claiming. That’s what they say.”

“It does,” I said. “I won’t pretend it doesn’t. Vorak makes his position on the matter extremely clear on a regular basis.”

Something moved through her expression. Not quite amusement. Close to it.

“But the pull is mine to manage,” I said. “Not yours to accommodate. You’ve spent your whole life having other people’s needs and wants and requirements handed to you as though they were your responsibility to carry. The bond is not going to be another version of that.”

She looked at me for a long time.

“You said you won’t claim it until I’m ready,” she said. “If I’m ever ready.”

“Yes.”

“That could be a long time,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“It could be never,” she said. She said it plainly, not as a test, not as a warning, just as a fact she

needed to put in the room to see what happened to it.

“I know that too,” I said.

She watched me.

“And you’re alright with that,” she said.

I considered that carefully before I answered because she deserved a careful answer and not a

quick one.

“No,” I said. “I won’t tell you I’m indifferent to it because I’m not and you’d know I was lying. The bond is real and what I feel because of it is real and the idea of never claiming it is not something I find easy.” I looked at her. “But what I want doesn’t override what you need. Those two things are

not the same weight.”

She was very still.

“Why?” she said.

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The bond is real

I looked at her.

+25 Points

“Why does it matter to you what I choose?” she said. “You’re the Alpha King. You could have walked into that shack and taken me out of it and brought me here and told me how things were going to be and nobody in the territory would have questioned it. Not one person.” She paused. “So why does my choice matter to you?”

The question sat in the room between us.

I had known it was coming. Had felt it building in the conversation since I sat down. It was the

right question, the most honest question she’d asked me yet, and it deserved an answer that

matched it.

The problem was I didn’t have a clean one.

‘Tell her, Vorak said quietly.

‘I’m trying,‘ I said.

‘Then stop trying and just say it,’ he said.

I looked at Isla.

“I don’t have an easy answer to that,” I said. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing since the

shack.” I paused. “What I know is that when I found you chained to that floor the thing that hit me

first, before the bond, before anything else, was that every choice that had ever mattered to you

had been made by someone else. What you ate. Where you slept. Whether you were in pain. All of

it decided by other people without you being consulted at all.”

She was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t fully read.

“And the bond hit me immediately after that,” I said. “So the two things arrived together. The

understanding of what had been done to you and the knowledge that you were mine.” I paused. “I

think that’s why. Because the first thing I understood about you was that you’d never been given a choice. And I couldn’t be the next person who didn’t give you one.”

The room was quiet.

She looked at her hands again.

“That’s not a simple answer,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I told you I didn’t have one.”

She was quiet for a long moment.

“The bond,” she said. “When you say I’ll feel it. I already do. I have since the shack. I didn’t know

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what it was at first.” She paused. “It feels like knowing where you are in the building without

looking.”

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