The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 49

* Something is shifting

Something is shifting

(Isla)

I left the library after he did.

+25 Points

Not immediately. I stayed in the chair for a while after his footsteps faded down the corridor and

looked at the space where he had been sitting and turned over what he had said.

The bond is real. Nothing happens that you don’t choose.

I had expected the careful version. The measured words of a man managing a situation. What I hadn’t expected was the honesty underneath it. That he had admitted it cost him something. That the idea of never claiming it was not something he found easy. And then in the same breath had

said but what I want doesn’t override what you need.

I put the book on the shelf and went downstairs.

The kitchen was past breakfast but I hadn’t eaten yet and Dena saw me come in and without a word put bread and fruit on a plate and set it on the small table near the window and went back to

what she was doing. I sat down and ate and somewhere in the middle of it I reached for a second

piece of bread without calculating whether I was allowed to.

I noticed it after.

My hand was already there, already holding the bread, and my body had not run the usual check first. Had not paused and assessed and decided. Had just reached.

I finished the bread and sat with that for a moment.

Then I went to find Sera for my ankle treatment and the morning went on.

By afternoon my ankle was wrapped and Sera had declared it better than the day before and I walked the eastern corridor without the stiffness that usually followed a morning of rest. I stopped at the library on the way back and stood in the doorway and looked at the chair Caius had sat in and thought about his face when he’d said the bond arrived the moment he walked through that door.

He hadn’t looked away when he said it.

I went to the sitting room and put something on the television and watched it without really watching it and thought about his answer to my question. Why does my choice matter to you. He had said he didn’t have an easy answer and then given me one of the most direct things anyone had ever said to me. 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.

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I turned that over until dinner.

+25 Points

The table was the usual gathering. Zeron, Lira, Raith, Pryor, Caius at the head. I took my place and the food came out and the conversation started up the way it always did, easy and without pressure, nobody requiring anything from me and nobody performing ease either, just people at a

table going about their evening.

Zeron was talking about two of his younger warriors.

They had gotten turned around in a section of forest they had patrolled for months, he said, and

had walked in the wrong direction for nearly two hours before one of them noticed the sun was on

the wrong side. He told it with the dry patience of a man who had heard every version of this

particular failure and was still faintly baffled that it kept happening.

It caught me off guard.

The laugh came out before I checked whether it was allowed. Small and quiet and real and gone

almost as quickly as it arrived but it had been there, genuinely there, and the moment it was out I

went still and looked at Caius the way I had always looked at whoever held the most authority in a

room after I did something unexpected.

He was already looking at me.

His face was not what I expected.

1 had learned most of his expressions by now. The controlled stillness he wore when he was

managing something. The focused attention of someone working through a problem. The almost

response that appeared sometimes when something I said landed in an unexpected place.

This was none of those.

It was something quieter and more direct than anything I had seen on him before. Not surprise.

Not warmth in the way warmth usually presented itself. Something that sat underneath both of

those things. Like he had been waiting without knowing he was waiting and the thing he had been

waiting for had just happened and the seeing of it had done something to him that he wasn’t

covering.

I looked away first.

Not because it frightened me. Because it was too much to hold for too long and I didn’t have anywhere to put it yet.

5

Zeron finished his story. The table moved on. Caius said something to Pryor and the conversation continued and nobody made anything of the moment.

Later I sat by my window with my knees pulled up and the forest dark outside and I thought about

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