The Alpha's Blind Luna

CHAPTER 2

Nobody moved for a long moment.

I could hear Grendon's breathing change. I could hear Sable somewhere to my left, a sharp little intake of air that meant she was recalculating something. I could hear the gathered wolves, all those unfamiliar heartbeats, doing the particular held-breath thing that crowds do when something happens that was not on the evening's schedule.

Kallu was still standing in front of me.

He had not moved since he said my name.

"How do you know what I am called?" I asked.

"I don't," he said. "I said it because it came to me."

I turned that over. In eighteen years of listening, I had learned to hear the difference between people who lied smoothly and people who said true things in unusual ways. His voice had the quality of the second kind.

Grendon recovered first. He was a man who had spent decades managing situations that slipped out of his hands and he was practiced at it.

"Alpha Kallu." His voice carried the warmth of someone who had rehearsed warmth. "I see our Cece has caught your attention. Shall we return to the…"

"No," Kallu said.

One word. The kind that ends a direction of conversation so completely that nobody tries to reopen it.

"I would like to speak with her," Kallu said. "Away from the hall."

"She is under my care," Grendon said carefully. "As her guardian I would need to…"

"I am not asking you," Kallu said.

The silence that followed was the kind that happens when a room full of people all understand at exactly the same moment that the balance of power in a conversation has permanently shifted.

I felt a hand. Not grabbing. Offered. Open palm at my elbow, present without pressure.

"Will you walk with me?" Kallu said. To me. Not to Grendon. Not to the room. To me.

Nobody had asked me that before.

Not bring her or take her or come. Asked me. As though I had a preference that was worth considering.

"Yes," I said.

His hand moved to the lightest possible contact at my arm and he walked beside me. Not leading me. Beside me. He matched my pace and when I slowed slightly at the corridor threshold where the floor changed, he slowed with me without comment.

He took me to a room off the main corridor. Smaller. Quieter. The sounds of the festival muffled behind a closed door.

"Sit wherever you like," he said.

I found a chair by feel and sat. He sat somewhere across from me. Close but not crowding.

"How long have you been in Dunmore Pack?" he asked.

"Since I was an infant," I said. "Edda carried me here."

"Edda."

"My maid. The woman who was with me tonight."

"I saw her," he said. "Watching from the corridor doorway." A pause. "She looked like someone who was ready to walk through fire."

"She always looks like that," I said. "When it concerns me."

Something shifted in the quality of his silence. Not discomfort. Something more like recognition.

"You were born blind?" he asked.

"Three days old," I said. "My twin brother died on the same day. My father decided the two things were connected." I said it without performance. I had made my peace with the facts of it long ago. The facts were not the wound. The wound was everything done in response to them.

He was quiet for a moment.

"Your father was wrong," he said. Simply. Like stating weather.

"Yes," I said. "He was."

"Who told you that first?"

I almost smiled. "Edda. Every night for eighteen years."

Another silence. This one felt different. More settled.

"What do you want?" he asked.

I looked toward him, which was habit even though looking gave me nothing. "What do you mean?"

"What do you want? Not what you have. Not what you've been given or denied. What do you actually want."

Nobody had ever asked me that either. Not even Edda, who gave me everything she could, had ever asked me what I wanted because I think she was afraid the answer would be something neither of us could reach.

I thought about it honestly.

"To see," I said. "Once. Just to know what any of it looks like."

He did not respond with pity or with the particular gentle sadness people always offered this answer. He just received it.

"Is there anything else?" he said.

"To be somewhere that nobody brings me out for entertainment," I said.

A pause.

"Done," he said.

I turned my face toward him fully. "You can't just say done."

"I can," he said. "I just did."

Before I could respond, the door opened. Grendon's voice came in sharp and rehearsed, the voice of a man who had decided on his approach in the corridor.

"Alpha Kallu, forgive the interruption. The girl requires rest. She is not accustomed to extended social interaction and I would not want her to..."

"She is leaving with me tonight," Kallu said. "She and the woman called Edda. Have their things ready within the hour."

The silence that came from Grendon's direction was the specific silence of a man whose plan had not just failed but had been picked up and thrown in a different direction entirely.

"Alpha Kallu." His voice was careful now. Dangerous careful. "She is under my guardianship. There are legal pack agreements that govern..."

"Send the documentation to Ashenmoor," Kallu said. "I will review it and respond through the council."

He stood. I heard him stand.

"Cece," he said. "Is there anything from your room you need yourself?"

I thought of Edda's stone in my pocket.

"No," I said. "Edda has everything that matters."

"Then we leave in one hour."

Grendon made one more attempt. "Alpha Kallu, my daughter Sable had hoped to speak with you this evening about a possible alliance that would benefit both our packs…"

"Not tonight," Kallu said.

He walked past Grendon and out the door. I sat in the chair and listened to Grendon's breathing for a moment. It had the ragged quality of a man who had just lost something he did not know he had until it was gone.

I pressed the stone in my pocket.

For the first time in eighteen years, I was leaving Dunmore Pack.

And I had not even had to ask.

An hour later, Edda and I sat in the back of a vehicle moving through the dark toward the southern region. Edda's hand was in mine. I could feel her pulse. Fast, but steady. The pulse of someone who was still managing something but managing it well.

"Are you alright?" she whispered.

"Yes," I said.

"Do you know what is happening?"

"Not fully," I said. "But I know we are not going back."

Edda squeezed my hand once, hard, and then held it the rest of the way.

I pressed my face toward the window I could not see through and tried to imagine what the dark outside looked like.

I did not know yet that by morning I would not have to imagine.

And I did not know that someone in that vehicle already did.