Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 01

Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 01 — The Cake and the Contract

I woke up to singing.

Off-key. Too cheerful. Wrong.

My mother was smiling at me.

My mother never smiles at me.

There was a cake in my lap before I was fully awake.

And a contract behind it.

“Happy birthday, darling,” Marlene said, in that voice she used for guests and cameras. Sweet on top. Rot underneath.

I sat up so fast the blanket tangled my legs. Delphine floated in behind her with a tray, barefoot and glowing, the way favorite daughters always look at 8 a.m. My father hovered in the doorway holding his phone like he was filming a hostage video.

“Twenty,” my mother said, sitting on the edge of my bed. She smoothed my comforter. She had never once touched that comforter. “Such an important age for a she-wolf.”

“For a wolfless she-wolf,” I said. “You usually add that part.”

Her smile didn’t move. That’s how I knew this was bad.

Understand: my mother did not do birthdays. Not mine. Delphine got parties with ice sculptures and pack elders pretending to like each other. I got silence and a gas-station card. When I was twelve, she gave me a vacuum.

So a cake meant a trap. It always meant a trap.

“Blow out the candle,” my father said, too brightly. His eyes were doing the thing they did when he was afraid of his wife — darting toward the exits.

I didn’t blow it out. “What did you do?”

Marlene folded her hands. “Your father and I have arranged your future.”

“My what?”

“You’ve been promised,” she said, “to the Alpha King.”

The room didn’t go quiet. It went hollow. Like someone had scooped out the air.

“Say that again.”

“Rune Draven.” She said the name the way people say God in a storm. “The Alpha King has agreed to take a bride from a lesser pack to settle the northern territories. He chose Silvercreek. He chose the eldest daughter.” Her chin lifted. “You were promised at sixteen.”

“Sixteen?” My voice cracked. “I’ve never met him. Nobody has ever met him. There isn’t a single photograph of that man in existence—”

“He’s very private.”

“He’s a rumor, Mother! People say he executes Alphas at his own dinner table—”

“He is the most powerful wolf alive,” she snapped, and the honey was gone in an instant. “And he is willing to overlook the fact that you have no wolf. Do you understand what a mercy that is? You should be on your knees.”

There it was. The blade under the frosting.

Delphine twirled a strand of hair around her finger, watching me like a show she’d been waiting to binge. “They say he’s gorgeous,” she offered. “Also that he killed his own brother. Nobody knows which one’s true.”

“Fantastic,” I said. “I’m marrying a ghost with a body count.”

“The meeting is in three weeks,” my mother went on. “Dinner. Formalities. Then the announcement.”

“You didn’t ask me.”

“You don’t ask about an offer like this.” She stood, brushing invisible dust off her hands, off me, off the whole conversation. “You accept it.”

And that was the truth of my family in one sentence. I wasn’t a daughter. I was a line item. A failed asset finally moving in a merger.

I shoved the tray off my lap. The cake flopped sideways, the candle dragging a white smear across my sheets like a lie.

“I need air.”

“Wren—”

“Three days.” I was already reaching for my duffel. “Give me three days before you sell me, and I’ll sign whatever you want. I’ll smile in the photos. I’ll be a good asset.”

She hesitated. Control weighed against control. My father touched her arm. “Let her go. She’ll come back.”

“Fine,” she said finally, and that awful smile returned. “Go clear your head. But remember what’s waiting when you return.”

I didn’t answer.

The door clicked shut and I was already packing.

They thought they were giving me space to grieve my future.

What they didn’t know was that in nineteen hours I’d be standing in a cage under the Nevada desert, in a mask, with forty thousand in cash on my name — and that the wolves in that pit didn’t call me Wren.

They called me the Ghost.