The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 62

I let him see me–1

(Isla)

I was crossing the training yard when I heard it.

Not directed at me. That was the thing about careless words, they rarely were. He was talking to another warrior, someone I didn’t know well, and they were standing near the far side of the yard and I was passing through on my way back from the eastern path where I’d been walking since after breakfast.

I heard my name and then I heard the word after it.

Wolfless.

Said the way people said things they considered simple facts. Not cruelly, not the way Brent had said it, not with the weight Maren had put behind it when she wanted it to land somewhere specific. Just casually. The way you might mention the weather or the state of the fence line. A descriptor attached to a person without any particular care for whether the person could hear it.

I stopped walking.

Not a decision. My feet simply stopped and the rest of me stopped with them and I stood there on the path with the morning cold still in the air and the training yard in front of me and two warriors who hadn’t yet noticed that I’d stopped.

The warrior who’d said it was tall and broad in the way most Wraithbone wolves were built, the product of good training and consistent work. He had a forgettable face and an easy posture and he was saying something else now, something I wasn’t fully registering because the word was still sitting in me in a way that had nothing to do with the tone it had been delivered in.

Wolfless.

I’d been hearing that word since I was fifteen and each time it had cost me something. Not always in the obvious ways. Sometimes just in the small interior way of a person who hears something said about them often enough that they start checking automatically to see if it’s still true.

I turned around.

I didn’t plan to. My body turned before my mind fully decided to and by the time i registered what I was doing I was already facing him and my feet were already carrying me toward where he was standing.

He saw me before I reached him.

His conversation stopped mid sentence. Not because of anything I’d done yet. Just because I was walking toward him with a directness that apparently communicated something before I opened my mouth. The other warrior took a slight step back. Small. Probably not intentional.

I stopped in front of him.

He was taller than me by nearly a foot and broader by a significant margin and he was one of Caius’s trained warriors and I was a girl who’d been chained to a floor for five years and I stood in front of him and I looked at him and I didn’t look away.

He opened his mouth.

I didn’t speak. I just kept looking at him and something in my face, I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t choose it consciously, made him close his mouth again without finishing whatever he’d started to say.

The yard had gone quiet around us.

Not completely. The sounds of the territory continued in the distance. But the immediate area had developed the particular quality of a space where people have decided to pay attention without making it obvious they’re paying attention.

I kept looking at him.

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