The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 50

(Isla)

I was still at the window when it happened.

Not asleep. Not even close to it. I was sitting with my knees pulled up looking at the forest and thinking about the laugh and Caius’s face and the bread earlier and the way the day had felt different from the ones before it without me doing anything to make it different.

And then the heat came.

It started somewhere below my ribs. Not pain. Not quite. More like pressure that had temperature attached to it, a warmth that didn’t belong to the room or the fire or anything external. It moved up through my chest and into my throat and then it was gone, as quickly as it had come, leaving nothing behind except the awareness that it had been there.

I sat very still.

I pressed one hand flat against my sternum and felt nothing unusual. My heartbeat. My breathing.

The ordinary interior of a body going about its business.

I stayed at the window for a long time after that and it didn’t come back.

Eventually I went to bed and lay in the dark and told myself it was nothing. Stress. The body doing

strange things under unusual circumstances. Sera had told me the wolfsbane exposure had

suppressed my system in ways that would take time to clear. That was probably all it was.

I told myself that and almost believed it.

I was almost asleep when it came back.

This time it was behind my eyes. Not pain. Pressure. A building thing that sat at the back of my

skull and pressed forward and made the dark behind my eyelids feel less like nothing and more like

something waiting. I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling and breathed and after a minute it

eased back and the room was just a room again and the ceiling was just a ceiling.

I lay there and did not move.

I knew what wolves felt when their wolf was close to the surface. I had grown up in a pack and I had watched it happen to other people my whole life. The heat. The pressure. The way the senses sharpened in the moment before a shift. I had watched it happen to my father and to Brent and to

pack members going about their days and I had watched it from the outside for twenty years because it was something that happened to other people, to wolves, to people who had

something inside them that I had been told I did not have.

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under my skin

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I had been told that for so long that I had accepted it the way I had accepted everything else.

And now there was heat under my skin and pressure behind my eyes and I didn’t know what to do

with either of those things.

The not naming was important.

I understood that about myself clearly. I had learned very young that hoping for things was a

particular kind of dangerous. Not because hope itself was bad but because the distance between

hoping and not getting was a place I had been too many times and each time it had cost

something I couldn’t get back. The first time I hoped my father would step between me and

Rodan. The times I hoped someone at that table would say enough. The years I hoped the chain

was temporary.

Hope had a specific texture in my experience and it felt like this, like something building under the surface that I was trying not to look at directly because looking at it directly made it real and real

things could be taken.

So I didn’t look at it directly.

I knew what I was afraid to hope for.

I had been wolfless for twenty years. Had been told I was wolfless so consistently and by so many people and in so many different ways that it had become part of how I understood myself. Not just something that was wrong with me. Something that was fundamentally true about me, a defining absence that explained everything else, why I had no value in the pack, why the chain was justified,

why I was something to be managed rather than someone to be considered.

If that wasn’t true.

I stopped the thought there.

Every time it got to that point I stopped it and put it somewhere I couldn’t see it and went back to whatever I was doing. Because if I let it finish, if I let myself sit with the full version of what I was almost thinking, and then it turned out to be nothing, just the wolfsbane clearing from my system and my body adjusting, then I would have given something to the hoping and losing it would cost more than I could currently afford.

I had gotten this far by being careful about what I let myself want.

So I was being careful.

I lay in the dark and I felt the faint residual warmth under my skin and I listened to the pack house settle around me and I did not name it and I did not hope and I told myself that tomorrow would just be a day and whatever was happening under my skin was something I could keep managing

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