The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 58

The first real fury–1

(Isla)

He left and I stayed where Twas.

The phone rested in my hands again, but wasn’t using it. The screen had gone dark and my thumb lay across it without moving. I looked at the door after it closed and listened to his footsteps fade down the corridor and then I looked at the phone and then at the fire and then back at nothing at all. The room was quiet, too quiet for the kind of thoughts now moving through me.

Your safety here doesn’t depend on any of this.

He’d said it plainly. No conditions. No hidden shape to it. Wolf or no wolf, shifting or not shifting, time or no time, nothing about my place here changed. He’d said it the way he said everything, without dressing it up or trying to make it easier than it was, and I believed him. That was the part that sat strangely in me. I believed him, and once that settled, other things had room to rise.

I put the phone beside me and leaned back against the headboard.

At first it was only thought. Not feeling. Thought was easier. Thought could be arranged and examined and moved from one place to another until it made enough sense to live with. Feeling was harder. Feeling didn’t ask permission before it arrived. I thought about what Sera had said. I thought about the chain. I thought about the years before the chain. I thought about a wolf under all of it, buried and quiet and pressed down until even I believed there was nothing there at all.

I thought about my father.

That was where it started.

Not with Rodan. Not with Maren. My father. Because Rodan had always been exactly what he was. Maren too. Cruelty in them didn’t surprise me anymore, not after enough years of watching it. But my father had been the first shape of safety I ever knew, even if it was a weak one, even if it hadn’t lasted long, even if it had mostly been my own child mind filling in what was missing because children did that when they needed to survive. Father meant something to a child before the child understood whether the man

deserved the word.

And he’d asked for the chain.

My breathing changed.

୮

I sat up straighter without meaning to. The thought landed in me harder now than it had when I first understood it. Not as information. As fact. A real thing done by a real man to a real child, and that child had been me. He’d seen me, looked at what I was going through, and instead of stepping in front of it he’d gone to Rodan and asked for more of it. Not gone along with it after the decision had been made. Asked for it.

Something moved under my skin.

Heat.

Not the brief uncertain warmth from the night before. This came faster. Stronger. It started under my ribs

and spread outward in a rush that made the room feel too close all at once. I got off the bed before I’d Tully decided to move and crossed to the window and stood there with one hand on the frame.

The glass was cool under my palm.

I breathed in and looked out at the dark shape of the forest and thought about my mother. About the distance between the house and the shack. About five years of living close enough to walk there in minutes and never once coming. Not once. Not when it rained. Not when it was cold. Not when I was hungry. Not when I was sick. Not when I had blood on my back or burns on my ankle or nothing in my stomach except what I’d been given because someone else decided I’d earned survival for one more day.

The heat pushed higher.

I closed my eyes.

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