The Alpha's Blind Luna

CHAPTER 5

The message arrived before I finished breakfast.

I knew something had happened by the way Renn's footsteps changed in the corridor outside my door. He had a particular rhythm I had already memorized, even and measured, the walk of someone who moves at the same pace regardless of circumstances. When I heard him coming to my door faster than that pace, I set down my cup.

He knocked.

"Come in," I said.

He was younger than I had imagined from his voice. Sharp-featured, lean, with the expression of someone choosing words carefully before releasing them.

"Alpha Kallu would like you to join him," he said. "When you are ready."

"What happened?" I said.

He looked at me. I could see him decide to be straight with me.

"A message from Dunmore," he said. "Grendon is calling for a formal pack council review of your removal. He is claiming Alpha Kallu took you under coercion."

I sat with that for exactly two seconds.

"He is claiming I was coerced," I said.

"Yes."

"I walked out of that hall on my own feet," I said. "I got into that vehicle without being asked twice."

"I know," Renn said. "That is the response Alpha Kallu intends to make. He would like your account recorded formally before he replies."

I stood up.

Edda appeared from the doorway of the connecting room where she had clearly been listening. She looked at me with an expression that was managing anger carefully.

"I will come," she said. Not to Renn. To me. A statement of fact.

"I know," I said.

Kallu's office was on the upper floor. I saw it properly for the first time, wide and ordered, everything functional, nothing decorative except a single carved wooden panel on the wall behind his desk that looked old and deliberate. He was standing at the window when we came in, which I was already beginning to understand was his thinking position.

He turned when we entered.

He looked at me and then at Edda and something in his face acknowledged her presence with a respect that Edda received with a small lift of her chin.

"Sit, please," he said.

We sat.

"Grendon has filed a formal complaint with the northern pack council," he said. "He is claiming your removal from Dunmore was unauthorized and that you were taken without proper guardian consent."

"He was not my guardian," I said. "He was the person who took me in because it cost him nothing and occasionally returned something. That is not guardianship."

"In the legal definition under northern pack law it qualifies," Kallu said. He said it without apology, just information. "He accepted informal guardianship when he admitted you to Dunmore as an infant. Under that law, your removal requires his consent until you are formally transferred to another pack's record."

"Or?" I said. There was an or. I could hear it in the shape of the sentence.

"Or you formally request transfer yourself," he said. "As an adult. Which you became last night."

I looked at him.

"It is your birthday," he said. "You turned eighteen. The request can be filed today in your own name."

"Then file it," I said.

"I want you to understand what you are choosing," he said. "Filing that request formally aligns you with Ashenmoor Pack. It opens you to whatever political challenge Grendon chooses to raise in response. He will raise one."

"I know he will," I said. "He has been taking from me for eighteen years. He will not stop willingly." I held Kallu's gaze across the desk. "But I am not asking his permission anymore. I never should have needed it."

Kallu looked at me for a long moment.

Then he reached across the desk and put a document in front of me.

"Read it," he said. "All of it. If there is anything you disagree with, tell me."

I picked it up.

This was the second document I had ever been asked to read for myself. The first had been a pack kitchen supply list in Dunmore that Grendon's housekeeper had shoved at me by accident and taken back when she remembered I was blind. I had run my fingers over the ink lines and tried to understand them.

Now I read it. Every word. It took me longer than it would have taken someone who had read their whole life, but I read it.

I signed it.

Kallu took it without expression and handed it to Renn.

"Send it before noon," he said.

After Renn left, the office was quiet for a moment.

Edda spoke first, which was unusual. She was not someone who pushed into silences that were not hers.

"Alpha Kallu," she said.

He looked at her.

"I carried this child out of a forest when she was four days old," Edda said. Her voice was steady and very clear. "I walked for three days to find something that looked like shelter. I have been in Dunmore Pack for eighteen years because I would not leave her there alone." She paused. "I am not asking you for anything. I am telling you so that you understand who she is. So that there is no version of this that proceeds without you knowing what it cost her to still be sitting in that chair without bitterness."

The room was very quiet.

Kallu looked at Edda for a long moment.

"I understand," he said. Two words. The kind that are the right size for what they are responding to.

Edda nodded once and folded her hands in her lap.

That afternoon I met the full Ashenmoor Pack in the main hall.

I stood beside Kallu and looked at them looking at me. I could see the doubt in some faces and the curiosity in others and the particular careful neutrality of people who were going to form their opinion based on what came next rather than what had already been announced.

Kallu spoke briefly. He said I was his mate. He said I was now a member of Ashenmoor Pack. He said questions could be brought to Renn.

Then he looked at me.

And I understood I was being given the floor if I wanted it.

I stepped forward slightly.

"I know you have questions," I said. "I have them too. I spent last night seeing for the first time and I am still learning what your faces mean when they change." I kept my voice even. "What I can tell you is this. I spent eighteen years in a pack that kept me as entertainment. I learned more in those years than anyone intended me to. I hear things clearly. I read rooms well. I am not decoration." I paused. "I intend to be useful here. If that takes time to establish, I can wait. I have been patient for eighteen years. I know how to do it."

The hall was quiet.

Then a woman in the second row, broad-shouldered with grey at her temples, nodded once.

Small gesture. But I saw it.

That night, lying in my room looking at a ceiling I could finally see, I heard footsteps stop outside my door. They did not knock.

They stood there for a moment.

Then they moved away.

I already knew those footsteps.

I looked at the ceiling for a long time.

I did not know yet that while I slept, someone inside Ashenmoor Pack was writing the first of many messages to Dunmore. Not to Grendon.

To Sable.

And what Sable was being told would bring her to Ashenmoor within the week.

What it would cost her to come, she did not yet know.

What it would cost me, neither did I.