The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 75

Something breaks open–1

(Isla)

Caius turned the page and said Maren’s name.

Claim

The room seemed to pull tighter around the sound of it. Maren stood under guard near the front ranks, her face arranged into something calm enough to fool someone who didn’t know her. I knew her. I knew the exact shape of that control and the way she used it like a clean cloth laid over rot. She had watched too much and ordered too much and walked away too often for that face to mean anything to me now.

Caius began reading her charges.

I heard each word clearly at first. Sanctioning abuse. Denial of food. Oversight of household labor under unlawful punishment. Knowledge of wolfsbane confinement. Failure to intervene. Participation in maintaining conditions meant to degrade and exhaust. His voice didn’t change as he read, and that made it worse in a way. He wasn’t angry for the room. He was simply stating facts that had been allowed to live too long without names.

Maren didn’t look at me.

That was what I noticed more than anything else. Not the charges. Not the way the room listened. Not Rodan standing there with his face grey and chains at his wrists. Maren kept her eyes on Caius as if looking at me would give something away she still thought she could keep. It was such a small thing, but it reached into me and found a place I hadn’t known was waiting.

I thought of the plate I had dropped that morning.

Her voice telling me to clean the mess I had made while my back was bleeding under my shirt. The way she had walked inside as if what happened in the yard belonged to the same category as weather or noise or anything else that passed once you closed a door. I’d carried that moment in pieces for so long that hearing her name read into law made those pieces gather together. Something in me answered it at once.

Something moved under my skin.

At first it was warmth. I knew that much now. I’d felt it before, in my room, in the night, in the cold yard when anger finally found a place to go. But this was not the same. This came from deeper inside me and rose with more force, spreading through my chest and down my arms before I could decide what to do with it. I kept my hands at my sides and made myself breathe.

Caius kept reading.

The words began to change shape. I still understood them, but they seemed farther away and closer at the same time. The room was too clear in pieces and less clear as a whole. Maren’s hands. Rodan’s chains. Brent’s mouth. My father’s lowered eyes. A woman in the third row pressing her fingers together. The grain of the wooden floor in front of my boots.

I blinked

The light shifted strangely. Not darker. Not brighter. Different. The edges of things seemed too defined and then not defined enough. I looked toward Caius because he was the nearest thing I trusted to remain what he was. His hand held the page. His voice moved through the charge. His body was turned toward the

Something beds open 1

room, but I knew some part of his attention was still on me because it always was.

The heat climbed higher.

It reached my throat and settled behind my eyes. Pressure followed. Stronger than before. It pressed forward from the back of my skull and for a moment I thought I might lose my place in the room entirely. I didn’t fall. I didn’t sway. I stood where I was, but inside me something was pushing against a boundary that had held too long.

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