Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 42: A Day Away

~LYRA’S POV~

Ryland was standing beside my bed when I woke up.

I blinked at him. He was fully dressed, arms folded, looking at me with the particular expression he wore when he’d made a decision and was waiting for me to catch up to it.

"What’s going on?"

"We’re going out,"

I pushed myself up on one elbow.

"Going out where?"

"It’s a surprise."

I looked at him for a long moment. "Ryland."

"Take your time and get ready." He smiled, a real one, the kind that didn’t arrive on his face very often and meant something when it did.

"I’ll be waiting whenever you’re ready."

He left, and I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the door for a moment before getting up.

I washed my face, changed out of my sleeping clothes, and spent more time than I usually would deciding what to wear, which I immediately noticed and refused to examine too closely. Something practical, I didn’t know where we were going. Dark trousers, a shirt that fit properly, boots I could actually move in. I braided my hair back, looked at the blue tips in the small mirror, and decided I liked them.

And an hour later I was ready.

—

He was in the main corridor, leaning against the wall with the particular ease of a man who genuinely didn’t mind waiting. He looked up when I appeared and didn’t say anything about the hour, which I appreciated.

"Where are we going?" I tried again, as we walked through the gates.

"You’ll see when we get there."

"You know, we should be training, planning. Preparing against what’s coming. Not..."

I gestured vaguely at the open road ahead, the morning light, the distinct absence of any maps or weapons or any of the things we’d been surrounded by for weeks.

"I know that," Ryland said. "You’ve been training every day since you arrived. A single day away from all of it won’t hurt anything."

I looked at him. He kept walking, looking forward, perfectly composed.

Then I laughed. Short and genuine, because he was completely right and the simple rightness of it caught me off guard.

He glanced sideways at me with something quiet in his expression that I didn’t look at too long.

"Come on,"

—

The first place he took me was a small market town about an hour’s ride from the packhouse, not Silverclaw’s main market, a smaller one, built along a river, the kind that had been there for centuries and smelled of bread and fresh water and things being traded by people who had been doing it their whole lives.

We walked through it without any particular agenda. He pointed out a goldsmith whose family had been in the same stall for four generations. I tried food I’d never had before from a woman who apparently knew Ryland by name and gave him a look that communicated both fond exasperation and genuine warmth.

Nobody treated me like the Luna. Nobody treated me like anything except a person walking through a market with someone they knew. It was one of the more extraordinary things I’d experienced in months. ƒreewebɳovel.com

—

The second place was an open field, high grass moving in a light wind, the kind of place that looked like it had been left alone on purpose.

There was already a blanket laid out in the middle of it.

I stopped. Looked at the blanket. Looked at Ryland.

"You brought food," I said.

He reached the blanket and produced a basket from behind a hedge that absolutely hadn’t been there accidentally. He set it down with the composure of a man who had done nothing unusual.

"You came prepared," I said.

"Absolutely." He looked at me over the basket. "Anything for you."

Something in my chest did a thing I chose not to name. I sat down on the blanket and actually smiled, the unguarded kind, the one that happened before I could think about it.

"Lunas are permitted to have fun," he said, sitting across from me and opening the basket.

"Is that an official ruling?"

"Written into the charter," he said. "Page forty-three."

"I don’t believe you."

"There may not be a page forty-three,"

I laughed. He smiled. And we ate.

The conversation wandered in the comfortable way that conversations wandered when the pressure was off, from nothing significant to less significant, from observations about the field to a disagreement about which of the three training sessions I’d hated most, which somehow became a debate about whether Kael’s methods were genuinely effective or just unpleasant for the sake of it.

"Both," I said. "It can be both."

"He’d take that as a compliment," Ryland said.

"He’d be right to,"

At some point he said something I didn’t expect and I threw a piece of bread at him, which he caught without looking, which made it worse, and I was on my feet and he was already moving and we spent the next several minutes chasing each other through the tall grass like people who had completely forgotten that either of us had any kind of position or responsibility at all.

I was slightly out of breath when we finally stopped.

He was too, which I found satisfying.

—

The last place was a hill.

Not a small one. A genuinely large hill, the kind that required effort to reach the top of, and when we got there I understood immediately why he’d brought me here and nowhere else for the final stop.

The whole territory spread below us. Every edge of it, as far as the light carried, forests, fields, the packhouse in the distance, the river from the market town catching the afternoon sun. The shape of everything he’d spent his whole life protecting, visible all at once from a single point.

"Wow," I said quietly. "This is incredible."

He nodded once, and he was smiling in a way I hadn’t seen before, something private in it, the smile of a person looking at a thing that had mattered to them for a very long time.

"How did you manage coming here as a child with the..."

"The height?" he finished.

"Yes. What if you had..."

"Fallen from here," he completed.

"Yes." I looked at the long way down. "Fallen."

He looked over the edge and then back at me. Something in his expression was lighter than usual.

"Don’t mind me," I said quickly. "I’m just..." I laughed.

"It’s fine," he said. "Luckily I’m still here, meaning I never did."

"Why did you come here as a child?" I watched his face.

He looked at the view for a moment. ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom

"To be alone. Away from pack orders, duties, all of it." He looked at me. "I came here when I wanted to feel free."

I held his gaze. "Believe me," I said quietly, "I know exactly what that feels like."

Something shifted between us. I felt it before I could name it, the pull I’d been carefully not examining for weeks, the thing that had been growing steadily in the space between every conversation and every shared silence and every morning I’d woken up knowing he was somewhere in the same building. It was there now with nothing between it and the surface, and from the way he was looking at me, the particular stillness of him, I understood that he felt it too.

I closed the small remaining distance between us.

The first kiss was soft, questioning, barely a second long.

We pulled back.

Then his hand came up to the side of my face and we kissed again, properly.

When we finally stopped, our foreheads rested against each other, both of us breathing.

"Whatever comes next,,. we face it together."

I closed my eyes.

"Together,"