The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 63

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Tlet him see me–2

But something in him was responding to something in me.

His eyes went to the ground.

Not dramatically. Not with any particular display of submission. They just dropped to the ground the way eyes dropped when they’d been held too long by something they didn’t know how to hold back.

I turned around and walked away.

My hands were shaking.

I noticed that before I’d taken three steps, the particular fine tremor that ran through my fingers when something large had moved through me and hadn’t fully resolved yet. I kept walking and I didn’t look back and I didn’t press my hands together or put them in my pockets or do anything that would make the shaking visible to anyone watching.

My head was up.

That was the part I was aware of most clearly. My head was up and my pace was the pace I’d chosen and I was walking away from that exchange on my own terms and the shaking in my hands wasn’t shame and it wasn’t fear and it wasn’t the particular trembling of someone who’d done something wrong and was bracing for the consequence.

It was something else.

Something that felt like the physical aftereffect of having done a thing I hadn’t known I was capable of doing. Like the way a muscle felt after being used properly for the first time in a long time. Not broken. Not damaged. Just active in a way it hadn’t been before

I reached the path that led back to the pack house and I kept walking.

I thought about the word.

Wolfless.

I’d let that word decide things about me since I was fifteen. Had let it be the reason the chain was justified and the shack was acceptable and the hunger was appropriate and the pain was deserved. Had let it sit at the center of my understanding of myself like a load bearing wall that everything else was built against.

It wasn’t a load bearing wall.

It had never been a load bearing wall.

It had been a lie told so often and by so many people that it had calcified into something that felt like architecture but was really just damage that nobody had bothered to clear away.

And that warrior had used it the way people used furniture, without thinking, without caring, as a convenient shorthand for a person he hadn’t looked at closely enough to see properly.

I’d turned around.

Claire

Not because I had a wolf to prove. Not because Caius was watching or because the pack needed to see something or because I’d decided today was the day I was going to make a point. I’d turned around because the word had landed and for the first time in my life something in me had responded to it not with the flinch of someone absorbing à blow but with the particular clarity of someone who knew the blow

was wrong.

My hands were still shaking when reached the side door.

I stood outside it for a moment and looked at them.

Then I looked at the training yard in the distance where two warriors had gone back to whatever they’d been doing before I walked through it.

Then I opened the door and went inside.

My head was still up.

I kept it there all the way up the stairs and down the corridor to my room and when I closed the door behind me and finally let out a breath that had been sitting in my chest since the moment I’d turned around, my hands were already steadying.

Not all the way.

But most of the way.

I sat on the chair by the window and looked at the forest and thought that five years was a long time to carry something false and I was done carrying it.

Not all at once.

Not cleanly.

But done.

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