The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 64

A place to think–1

(Caius)

I set the pen down before finished the page.

The work in front of me was clear and ordered but my attention had moved away from it. When that happened I had learned to pay attention because it was never without reason.

Clapt

Vorak was close. Not pushing. Just present in the particular way that meant he thought I should be doing something other than what I was currently doing.

I stood and moved to the cabinet and took a spare set of clothes, folded them under my arm, and left the office.

I stopped at her door and knocked.

“It’s Caius,” I said, and waited.

A pause. The faint sound of something being set down. Then her voice.

“You can come in,” she said.

I opened the door and stepped inside. She was sitting on the bed with the phone in her hands and she looked up when I came in with the particular attention she gave unexpected arrivals, quick and assessing and then settling once she’d registered it was me.

“I want to take you somewhere,” I said.

“Where?” she asked.

“There’s a lake on the eastern edge of the territory,” I said. “It’s quiet. I thought you might want to see it.”

She stood and put on her coat and we left together.

We moved through the pack house without speaking, down the stairs and across the hall and out through

the side door.

I stopped and turned to her and held the folded clothes out.

“Can you carry these?” I said.

She looked at them and then at me and took them without question and tucked them under her arm.

“When I shift,” I said, “get on my back. I’ll carry you to the lake.”

She looked at me for a moment. “Alright,” she said.

I stepped back and shifted.

She didn’t look away. She watched without flinching as the change moved through me, bone and muscle rearranging until I was standing in wolf form in front of her. As Alpha King Vorak was larger and more powerfully built than any other wolf in the territory, dark and solid and unmistakably the same presence in this form as in the other.

A place to hit

She took it in without alarm

Claim

Then she came forward and put her hand against my side and climbed onto my back, settling her weight carefully and finding her grip without fumbling.

Her hands found a place that held.

We moved into the trees.

The path changed underfoot as we went deeper and I moved through it steadily, adjusting before each change in terrain came. After the first few minutes I felt her settle into the movement, her grip easing as her body found the rhythm of it.

The lake came into view ahead.

Still and dark and wide, sitting in the trees like something that had been there before everything else and would be there after. I followed the path along the shore until we reached a clearing where the trees opened and the water spread out fully in front of us.

I stopped.

She slid off and stepped back and held the clothes out toward the nearest large tree without being asked. I moved behind it and shifted back and dressed quickly and came back around and stood beside her.

She glanced at me when I appeared. Something moved through her expression that was close to amusement before she let it pass. She turned back to the lake without making anything of it.

“It’s beautiful,” she said quietly.

“It’s been here longer than the pack house,” I said. “Longer than the pack.”

We found a place to sit near the edge of the shore where a wide flat rock jutted out close to the water. She sat and pulled her coat closer and looked out at the lake and I sat beside her and the quiet settled around us naturally.

The water was completely still. The tree line across it was dark and unbroken and the sky above it had gone to the pale grey of late afternoon. Somewhere in the distance a bird moved through the trees and the sound of it carried clearly across the water and then faded.

After a while she asked, “Does anyone come here?”

Comments