The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 55

truth she was denied–2

Wolfless.

Nothing there.

No wolf.

I heard my own voice before I felt myself decide to speak. “No.”

Sera did not interrupt.

“I didn’t shift,” I said. “At fifteen I didn’t shift. Nothing happened. They waited and nothing happened.”

“I know,” she said.

“I have never felt a wolf.”

“I know.”

I looked at her and anger came up so fast it surprised me. “Then how can you sit there and tell me this now?”

Her face did not change. “Because I am not guessing.”

I looked away from her. Out the window. At the trees I could not actually see because all I could see was the yard at Ashcrest and my fifteenth birthday and Rodan’s face and my father’s eyes on the ground and the first night in the shack and the chain that came later. My hands had gone cold in my lap.

“You said it was there,” I said. “Then where has it been?”

“Suppressed,” she said. “Forced down. Quieted for so long that your body adapted around the silence.”

I turned back to her. “By what?”

She did not answer immediately. “Most likely prolonged wolfsbane exposure from a young age, combined with stress and malnutrition and everything else done to your body over time.”

The room seemed to tilt around that.

“From a young age?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Before the chain?”

“Yes.”

ľ

I looked at her and for one awful moment the answer was too large to hold. It moved through everything at once Childhood. The house. The kitchen. The years before the shack that I had spent telling myself were bad but survivable because at least they had happened before the chain and the floor ring and the shack door. I thought about all the things in the report I had not seen but knew existed because Caius had gone through them and looked at people with those unreadable eyes after.

“They did that too?” I said.

Sera held my gaze. “Yes.”

I

I looked down at my hands. They were not shaking. That surprised me. I expected them to be. Instead they sat very still in my lap while something much deeper moved through me and made it hard to breathe properly. I had spent so long building myself around one truth that the removal of it left nothing firm underneath at first.

“If what you’re saying is true,” I said carefully, “then everything that came after?”

“Was built on a lie,” Sera said.

I closed my eyes.

Not for long. Just long enough to stop the room from feeling too bright. When I opened them again she was still there, same chair, same expression, same certainty. She was not taking it back. She was not softening it. She was just sitting there with the truth laid out between us and waiting for me to reach it in my own time.

“You said it was suppressed,” I said. “Why now?”

“Because the wolfsbane is gone,” she said. “Because your body is finally resting. Because you are eating regularly. Because fear is not using everything you have every hour of the day.” She paused. “Because whatever was held down is beginning to push back.”

I thought about the warmth in my chest. The pressure behind my eyes. The moments where the world seemed clearer than before. The alertness that came with no obvious cause. The feeling under my skin l had refused to name because naming it made it real and real things had a way of being taken.

And now it was real anyway.

“I thought it was nothing,” I said.

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