Chapter 98: The Alpha King

Isadora’s POV

The woman was the first person I saw when I walked in. She was standing just inside the entrance, watching me the way she always watched me, like she already knew everything about me and found it quietly amusing. Like I was something she had been observing for a long time and had already formed all her opinions about.

She reached out and touched my hair.

I slapped her hand away before she got more than two fingers into it.

She smiled. Not offended. Not surprised. Just smiled like she had expected exactly that and found it entertaining. Then she raised one hand slowly, extending it toward the room ahead of her, smooth and unhurried, telling me to go in.

I straightened my dress and walked past her.

The door closed behind me as I looked across the room, and saw the man.

He was standing at the window.

His back was to me when I entered, one hand resting on the frame, looking out at whatever was beyond the glass. The room was the same as before. The stone and the cold and the moonlight cutting through in long pale stripes across the floor. The torches burned without warmth along the walls.

I stood just inside the door and waited.

Then he turned.

That face. I had been thinking about it since the last time I was here, telling myself I was thinking about it because he was dangerous and I needed to understand who I was dealing with. Telling myself the thinking was practical. Strategic. Not because of the way his face looked when he turned and the light caught it.

But then the smile came and every practical thought I had arranged dissolved immediately.

It was not a small smile. It was a real one, spreading across his face and changing everything about it, taking features that were already striking and making them something else entirely. Something warm and deliberate and aimed directly at me.

He gestured to the chair across from him.

"Sit," he said.

I sat.

He sat opposite me, settling back with the ease of someone who had never once in his life sat in a chair and felt anything other than completely at home in it. He looked at me for a moment. One eyebrow lifted slightly.

"What interesting news do you have for me, Issa?"

The nickname landed before I was prepared for it. Something moved through my chest at the sound of it, that particular warmth that had no business being there, sitting right next to the pull I felt every time I was near him that I still could not explain or name or get rid of no matter how many times I told myself to stop feeling it.

I pressed all of it down and focused on the main fact. His identity.

I needed to know who he was.

I had been thinking about it since the last time I left this room. Turning it over in my head on the walk back and every day since. He knew my name before I gave it to him. He had a woman who opened portals and moved through darkness like it was a door she used every day.

I had information he wanted. That was the only leverage I had. And I was not giving it away for free.

I looked at him directly.

"You want information," I said. "I want your identity. Tell me who you are and I will tell you what I know."

He looked at me for a moment.

Then he laughed.

Not a polite sound. A real one, coming up from somewhere genuine, filling the room briefly before settling back down. He shook his head slightly like he was still processing the fact that I had said it.

"You are a smart one, Issa," he said. "I will give you that." He tilted his head. "But do you really want to know who I am?"

"I am working for you," I said. "I have a right to know who I am working for."

He stared at me for a while and stood up.

He walked closer to where I was sitting, unhurried and completely comfortable with the distance closing between us. When he stopped he extended one hand toward me, palm facing upward, and looked at me.

I looked at his hand.

Then at his face.

Then back at his hand.

I reached out and took it.

Just then the room was gone.

Not gradually. All at once, the stone and the torches and the cold air simply disappeared, replaced by open sky and green grass and warm sunlight hitting my face from above. I was standing in a field. Wide and bright and completely real in a way that the place I had just been standing in was not.

Then I heard a sound.

Feet hitting grass. Small and fast and getting louder.

A boy came running toward me across the field. Small and quick, his arms pumping, his face split wide open with a laugh that came straight from somewhere completely happy and completely unguarded.

"Mama! Mama!"

I went completely still.

He was running directly at me. His eyes were bright, and his cheeks were flushed from running, and he pointed back over his shoulder without slowing down.

"Come look! Papa hates butterflies!"

Mama.

He had called me mama.

I looked up from the boy’s face.

Rhydor was walking toward us across the grass. Not the Rhydor I knew from difficult mornings and cold silences and the training ground. This one was relaxed in a way I had spent years trying to coax out of him and never quite reaching. His shoulders were loose. His face was open. He was looking down at the boy running between us with something in his eyes that I had always wanted to be the reason for and never was.

He looked up at me and smiled.

I looked back at the boy.

He had Rhydor’s jaw. Sharp and clear, even on such a small face. Rhydor’s build too, the same broad shoulders in miniature. But the eyes were mine. I knew them the moment I saw them. They were looking back at me from a face that belonged to both of us.

My future.

I was looking at my future.

Then I was back in the room.

The field was gone. The sunlight was gone. The boy’s voice was gone. I was back in the cold room, and something in my chest was still reaching for the warmth I had just felt."

I looked at him.

My mind moved fast, pulling everything together, laying it out, and examining it the way you examine something when you already know the answer and are just confirming it.

The portal the woman had opened. The way this hall sat in a territory I did not recognize. The presence I felt from him every time he was near me, ancient and heavy and patient in a way no ordinary Alpha carried. And now this. Showing me my future with nothing more than a handshake.

Only one kind of person had that power.

Only an Alpha King.

I dropped to my knees before I had finished the thought. My head went down.

"I am sorry," I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "I did not know. I never knew. Please." I pressed my hands flat against the stone floor. "Please do not kill me."

I had heard about the Alpha King since I was a child. Every pack had stories. A man who had lived for centuries. A power so vast that thousands of wolves together could not match it. And I had been standing in front of him bartering information like he was someone I could negotiate with. Being rude. Being clever. Looking him in the eye and making demands.

The silence that followed my words was the longest silence I had ever sat in.

Then his voice came.

"You do not need to worry about that."

I looked up slowly.

He was looking down at me with that smile again. Not the dangerous one. The warm one. Like my panic had not changed anything about his mood.

"Get up," he said. "And give me what you came to give me."

I stood. Smoothed my dress. Pulled myself back together one piece at a time.

Then I told him.

I kept it brief the way I knew he wanted it. The attack on the pack house. The chaos it left behind. The fact that the Luna of Crescent Moon and her second hand had not been seen or heard from since the night of the Ascension Rite ceremony. Gone. No word sent back. No explanation given.

When I finished he was quiet for a moment.

Then he smiled. "Thank you for that. But I still need one more thing from you, Issa."

He walked closer to me and I stayed where I was and watched him come. I thought about his face as he moved. About how young he looked. How completely impossible that was when I thought about everything I knew of him. I had heard his name since I was a child. Stories passed down through every generation of every pack I had ever known. A man who had been alive for hundreds of years. Who had walked through centuries while everything around him changed and he stayed exactly the same.

And he looked just a few years older than me.

How was that possible?

He stopped in front of me. He placed one arm on my shoulder. Then his eyes moved. Slowly and deliberately, down my face, across my shoulders, down to my chest, to my waist. Taking his time. Making no effort to hide what he was doing.

I understood.

I reached for the edge of my dress.

He frowned.

"Do you really think," he said, his voice dropping low and quiet, "that I want to get between those pathetic legs of yours?"

The words hit me somewhere deep, immediately, and humiliatingly. Inside my chest, something burned white hot. I opened my mouth.

Nothing came out.

I tried again.

Nothing.

I tried to move my hand. It stayed exactly where it was. I tried to turn my head. It did not move. I tried to step back, and my feet were exactly where they had been, and every instruction I sent to every part of my body came back unanswered as if the connection between my mind and my body had simply been cut.

Everything was still.

Everything except my eyes.

I could still see. Still feel. Still hear everything happening around me. My mind was completely awake inside a body that was no longer listening to it.

The Alpha King’s smile changed.

The warmth left it completely. What replaced it was something I had not seen from him before, something older and colder and far more honest about what he actually was underneath everything he had chosen to show me until now. It moved across his face slowly and settled there like it belonged there and had always belonged there.

He pushed me lightly.

I sat down in the chair behind me. Not because I chose to. My body simply did it. Like it had been told to and had obeyed before, I could object.

I sat completely still in the chair. My hands in my lap. My mouth closed. My mind was screaming at a volume that reached absolutely nowhere."

Movement behind him.

The woman was walking forward from the shadows at the back of the room. Slowly. Her steps are deliberate and unhurried. The smile on her face was the widest I had ever seen, stretched past warmth into something that had nothing warm in it at all. The smile of someone who had been waiting for this specific moment for a very long time and was finally watching it arrive.

The Alpha King spoke without turning around.

"Are you ready for your new body, Drusilla?"

The woman’s smile stretched wider.

"More than anything on earth my lord."