The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 65

A place to think–2

“Occasionally,” I said. “Warriors on patrol pass through. But not often and not at this hour.”

“It feels far from everything she said.

“It is,” I said. “That’s why I come here when I need to think.”

She looked at me. “You come here to think?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“I didn’t picture you needing a place like that,” she said.

“Everyone does,” I said.

She looked back at the water. “What do you think about here?”

“The same things I think about everywhere,” I said. “The territory. The pack. What needs doing and what can wait. It’s quieter here so the thinking is cleaner.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“I used to think in the shack,” she said. “Not by choice. There wasn’t much else to do. But I learned how to make the thinking go somewhere useful instead of just going around in circles.”

“What did you think about?” I asked.

“Getting through the day mostly,” she said. “What needed to happen to make it to the next one. Sometimes I thought about what I would do if things were different. Not hoping exactly. More like practicing for something I didn’t believe would come.”

I said nothing and let her have the words.

“It came,” she said simply.

After a while she spoke again.

“Something happened this morning,” she said. “In the training yard. I wanted you to know.”

I waited.

“One of your warriors used a word about me,” she said. “Wolfless. He didn’t know I was close enough to hear. I turned around and walked up to him and looked at him until he looked away. Then I left.”

She said it simply. The way you said something that had happened and mattered without needing to dress

it up.

“He’ll be spoken to,” I said.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I’m going to anyway.”

A place to beers

She looked at me for a moment and said nothing.

“wanted you to know because it felt different,” she said. “Turning around. It didn’t feel like before.”

“No,” I said. “I imagine it didn’t.”

Clam

She looked back at the water. “The word didn’t have the same weight. I don’t fully understand why yet.”

“You don’t have to understand it yet,” I said. “It’s enough that you noticed.”

“Is it because of what Sera told me?” she asked. “About the wolf?”

“Partly,” I said. “And partly because the word didn’t change. You did.”

She took that in and said nothing for a while.

The light across the lake had shifted while we sat there, moving toward the deeper colour that came when the day was properly ending. The cold had settled in more fully but neither of us moved.

After a while I looked at her.

She was watching the water, her face relaxed and open in a way that had no guardedness left in it. She looked like someone finding their way back to a version of themselves that had been buried for a long time.

I looked at her for a moment longer.

Then I said, “Can I kiss you?”

She turned and looked at me. Not with alarm. Just looked at me the way she looked at things she was considering properly.

The quiet held.

Then she said, “Yes.”

I leaned forward and kissed her once, carefully, without pressure behind it. It lasted only a moment.

When I pulled back she was still looking at me. Her expression was something I didn’t have a word for, somewhere between surprise and certainty, in the space of a person encountering something they had decided to let themselves have.

Neither of us spoke.

The lake was still in front of us and the light continued to change and Vorak was quieter than he had been

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