The Alpha King And His Chosen Luna novel Chapter 9

The King’s Mate–2

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She was young. I registered that first. Young and thin in a way that was not natural, the kind of thin that came from being fed too little over too long a period. Her shirt was torn at the back and through the tear I could see the marks. Old ones, raised and pale, running across her back in lines that told me exactly what had put them there. And newer ones, not fully healed, sitting on top of the old.

My eyes went to her ankle.

A chain. Bolted to a ring in the floor. The skin around it was raw where the wolfsbane in the metal had been burning her. Not enough to incapacitate her fully. Enough to keep her weak. Ènough to keep her from running. Whoever had designed this had known exactly what they were doing and had done it with care, which was the part that sat in my chest like something cold.

She had not moved since I stepped inside. She was watching me with those eyes, waiting, and I understood that she was doing what she had learned to do in this room, which was to be still and wait and try to survive whatever came through the door.

I stood in the doorway and looked at her and she looked back at me.

And then it hit me.

There was no other way to describe it because nothing in my life had given me a word for it before this moment. It was not a feeling that built gradually or announced itself before arriving. It arrived all at once, like walking into a wall in the dark, like the ground dropping away under your feet, like every nerve in my body reorienting toward a single point at the same time without asking me whether I wanted that to

happen.

The mate bond.

I had known it existed. Every wolf knew it existed. I had gone eight years as Alpha King without feeling it and had privately concluded that it was either a thing that happened to other people or a thing that would come in its own time and I had no particular feelings about either possibility. I had a territory to run and a

crown to maintain and I had never had room for it.

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I had room for nothing else right now.

I stood completely still.

The girl in the corner was still watching me. She had not moved. She did not know what had just

happened to me and that was the only clear thought I had available to me in this moment because

everything else was being occupied by the bond, by the reality of it, by the fact that the person it was pulling me toward was sitting on a dirt floor in a rotting shack with wolfsbane burns on her ankle and whip

marks on her back and the expression of someone who had forgotten that the world contained anything other than pain.

My mate.

<The King’s Mate 2

Claim

Chained to the floor of a shack at the edge of a pack that I was going to take apart piece by piece before I left this territory.

I did not move toward her. She was already afraid and moving toward her would make it worse and I was aware enough of what the bond was doing to me to know that I needed to be careful right now. I needed to be in control of myself in a way that was going to require more effort than anything I had required of

myself in eight years of ruling.

I looked at her.

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