The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 81

The first shift–T

(Isla)

The first thing I understood was sound.

Not the sound of the hall, not voices, not the waiting pack behind the closed door. This was inside me. A deep pull beneath skin and bone, like something had woken and found every locked place at once. I tried to breathe through it, but breathing belonged to a body I no longer fully understood.

Caius was in front of me.

I knew that because his hands were near me and his voice was there, low and controlled, giving me something to follow. His face stayed close enough that I could find it when the room broke into pieces again. I wanted to tell him I was still there, but the words wouldn’t rise properly. They caught somewhere between my chest and throat and came out as a rough sound that frightened me because it was mine and

not mine.

“It’s alright,” he said.

It wasn’t alright.

My hands changed again, claws pushing through, then pulling back, then pushing harder until I couldn’t pretend this was only heat and pressure. My skin felt too small for what was inside it. My bones didn’t feel like bones anymore, but doors being forced open one after another.

I’d been told shifting hurt.

I’d heard girls whisper about it when I was younger, before fifteen, before the word wolfless became the only thing anyone allowed me to be. They’d spoken about pain and fear and the first run after. I’d imagined screaming. I’d imagined breaking. I’d never imagined this.

It was bigger than pain.

Pain had edges. Pain could be counted if I needed to survive it. This had no number and no clean place to hold it. It filled me until there was no room left for thought, only heat and breath and a force that didn’t ask whether I was ready.

“Caius,” I said, or tried to.

His name broke in my mouth.

r

His hands came to either side of me, not holding me down, not trapping me, just there. “I’m here,” he said. “Let it come. Don’t fight the whole of it.” I wanted to be angry at him for saying that, because how was ! supposed to let something this large happen to me without fighting it.

Another wave tore through me.

I bent forward and my hands hit the table. The wood cracked under my fingers and I stared at it without understanding how I’d done it. My nails weren’t nails anymore. My fingers were changing too fast for my eyes to accept. Fur moved over my arms and this time it didn’t vanish.

A sound came out of me.

Clain

It wasn’t a cry. It wasn’t a scream. It was deeper than both and it filled the room with a force that made the walls feel too close. Caius didn’t move away. He stepped closer, and I felt his hand at the back of my neck for one moment before another wave took even that from me.

Then I was falling inward.

The room vanished.

Not all at once. First the table went. Then the walls. Then Caius’s face became light and heat and scent. Then even my own name loosened until I couldn’t hold the shape of it. Isla became something far away, a sound someone else might use, a thing that’d been too small for too long.

I wasn’t gone.

I was everywhere.

I was inside my skin and under it and beyond it. I smelled wood, dust, Caius, stone, cold air somewhere outside, iron from chains beyond the door. I heard voices in the hall, muffled and tense. I heard Sera breathing near the wall. I heard my own bones finish becoming something else.

There was no thought after that.

Only movement.

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