The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 59

The first real fury–2

At all of them

At Rodan standing in the yard with his hands behind his back while they whipped me. At Maren speaking about practicality with her face composed and her clothes clean. At Brent laughing because he could. At Vera looking away because looking properly would’ve required something from her she never intended to give. At Helene choosing absence over action for years and years until absence itself became a kind of cruelty.

And under all of them, the thing that made all the others possible.

The lie.

Wolfless.

The word had been in my head so often it had stopped sounding like a word years ago and become more like weather, always there, always hanging over everything, deciding the shape of the day before anything in it even happened. Wolfless girl. Worthless girl. Useless girl. All the things built on top of the first false thing until the false thing was the floor everyone stood on without checking if it was real.

It wasn’t real.

That thought hit me so hard I had to grip the window frame with both hands. My father had let them build my life on a lie. My mother had watched it happen on a lie. Rodan had used it. Maren had justified it. Brent had enjoyed it. Every time they called me what I was not, every punishment, every hunger, every order, every humiliation, all of it had rested on something false and they’d known enough to keep going anyway.

The heat flared harder.

It moved up my neck and into my face and behind my eyes. Pressure came with it, stronger than before, enough that I opened my eyes fast and stepped back from the window because the room had started to feel too small. My skin felt wrong. Too close over everything under it. I pressed a hand to my chest and then pulled it away because that didn’t help.

I needed air.

I crossed the room quickly, grabbed the thicker coat from the chair, shoved my feet into the shoes nearest the bed, and left before I could think too much about whether I should. The corridor was empty. Good. I didn’t want anyone seeing my face right now because I didn’t know what was on it and I didn’t want to be asked if I was alright when I wasn’t sure I could answer without something breaking out of me that wouldn’t fit back in afterward.

The stairs went by under my feet. Then the hall. Then the side door.

Cold hit me the moment I stepped outside.

It was night enough now that the air carried the bite of it properly. I drew it in hard and stood just beyond the doorway with the coat half hanging open because I needed the cold more than I needed comfort. My body reacted to it at once. The heat didn’t vanish, but it had something to push against now. Something real and external and opposite.

The thread

I walked farther out into the yard.

The stones under my shoes were cold through the soles. The night air caught at my face and throat and hands. I stood there and breathed and Net it come into me until the worst of the heat under my skin stopped feeling like it might split me open from the inside.

I knew this wasn’t only anger.

That was the strange part. The anger was real and it was mine and it was finally large enough to feel honestly, but there was something else in it too. Something waking. Something answering the anger from underneath. The same thing Sera had named. The same thing Caius had told me he wouldn’t rush. It was there now, not separate from me but not the same as me either, rising in answer to everything I’d just finally let myself feel.

I stood in the cold and let that thought stay where it was.

Not fully looked at. Not turned away from.

The yard was quiet. Somewhere farther off I could hear movement near the training grounds, a late patrol crossing from one side of the territory to the other. The sounds came clearer than they should have. I noticed that too. The air in my lungs felt sharper. The cold on my face clearer. Even the dark seemed less flat than it had an hour ago.

I thought of Ashcrest again and this time I didn’t push the anger down.

I let myself feel it.

I let myself think about the door of the shack and the chain ring in the floor and the days I spent counting things because counting was the only shape I could give pain that made it bearable. I let myself think about the child I’d been before all of it and the lie that had wrapped around her so fully she’d grown up inside it and called it truth because that was easier than naming what had been done.

They took years from me.

The thought was simple. Not dressed up. Not hidden.

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