The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 71

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Their worldArtakung

Claim

Their world breaking–1

(Isla)

I stood beside Caius and listened to him read.

His voice carried through the hall with the kind of control that made every word land harder. He didn’t rush. He didn’t need to raise his voice. The charges were enough on their own. Rodan in chains at the front, Hadoc and Dolin beside him, the full pack gathered to hear years of cruelty spoken aloud without excuse or disguise.

I kept my eyes level.

That mattered more than I would’ve expected. In this hall, in this place, with memory pressing from every side, my eyes weren’t on the floor. They moved where I chose. They rested where I chose. The old instinct to make myself smaller was still somewhere in me, but it no longer ruled every part of me.

Caius turned a page.

The sound of paper seemed louder than it should have. So did breathing. So did the scrape of a boot when someone shifted and then went still again. The whole room felt as if it were listening with more than ears. Not just to the charges. To what those charges meant. To what they said about the years behind us and the judgment now standing in front of them.

That was when I looked at my family.

My father first.

Some part of me still went to him before anyone else, as if disappointment had deeper roots than pain. Derek stood near the front with the others named in the report. He looked thinner than I remembered, not from time, but from strain. His face had gone pale around the mouth. His eyes moved to Caius, then to the papers, then to Rodan in chains, and only after that did they come to me.

When they did, they didn’t stay.

He looked at me and understood what he was seeing. He understood who stood beside me. He understood what it meant that Caius had put me here, visible to the whole hall, while my father stood under guard with nowhere to hide. Then his eyes dropped again.

I felt no urge to save him from that moment.

If I’d imagined this once, years ago, I might have thought seeing him brought low would repair something old in me. It didn’t. It answered something. That was all. A question I had lived with too long finally had a plain and final shape. If choosing me had ever cost him anything real, he would’ve chosen himself.

He had.

He still would.

Even here, even now, he looked more frightened for his own future than ashamed of what he had allowed to be done to me. That truth no longer surprised me. It just stood there where I could see it clearly.

My mother stood beside him.

Then worldbreaking 1

Helene had always been harder to look at for long. Not because she was complicated. Because she had built a life around not being seen clearly. My father hid behind weakness. My mother hid behind silence.

When I was younger I had mistaken silence for helplessness. Later I understood it better. Silence was her preferred form of permission. She let things happen and called her own stillness helplessness so she wouldn’t have to call it choice.

Now she stood with her hands clasped in front of her and looked at me as if I were both familiar and impossible.

There was fear there. Not the hot kind Brent wore, A thinner kind. The fear of a woman who had set her life on one version of the world and was now watching it break in public. Wolfless. Worthless. Unwanted. Those had been part of the shape of the house for years. The shape of the table. The shape of every look she gave me and every look she withheld.

And I was standing beside the Alpha King while my life was being read into law.

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