Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 04

Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 04 – Two Lines

Two lines.

My mother is screaming. My father is on the phone with a doctor, asking how fast something like this can be

“handled.” Delphine is filming it.

And the mark on my throat – the one no dermatologist, no witch, no pack healer could explain in six weeks of trying

– just started to glow.

Right there. In the hallway. In front of all of them.

My mother saw it and stopped screaming mid–word, and I have never in my life seen that woman go silent.

Rewind eleven minutes.

I was on the bathroom floor with my forehead on cold tile, throwing up water because there was nothing left, and my mother stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and her mouth in that flat line she saves for me.

“Six weeks,” she said. “Six weeks since your little disappearance.”

I didn’t answer. It’s hard to be witty from inside a toilet.

“DESMOND!”

My father appeared in his robe, hair everywhere, face confused. “What is it, woman?”

“Your daughter is pregnant.”

He laughed. He actually laughed. “Marlene, she’s twenty.”

Should I draw you a diagram, Dad?

She pulled a white box from her bathrobe pocket like she was drawing a weapon. She’d bought it the day before.

She’d been waiting.

“Go. Pee on it. I’ll read it myself.”

Of course she would.

She barged in before I could stand and snatched it out of my hands like a prison guard confiscating a blade. She

stood in the hall tapping one foot on the tile, counting down the seconds until she could be right about me.

Two minutes.

Then the scream.

“I TOLD YOU! I TOLD YOU!”

My father sat down on the couch like his knees had quit. “Jesus.”

“WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?”

I said nothing. She wasn’t asking. She was performing.

She crossed the room and slapped me so hard my head snapped sideways and the wall came at me in a blur.

“ANSWER ME, YOU WORTHLESS LITTLE=”

The slap wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was how easy it was for her. How practiced.

And then her eyes caught on the mark burning at my throat, and on the ring on my left hand, and everything in her

face changed at once.

“What,” she said, very softly, “is that.”

She grabbed my wrist. Turned it toward the light. The red stone caught fire.

I’d tried for six weeks to find that crest. Nothing. Not one image, not one auction record, not one royal–house archive I

could bribe my way into.

I still didn’t know his name.

I didn’t know his face.

I only knew that I’d married him, that he’d marked me, and that whatever was inside me now had been growing since a

night I could only remember in flashes.

My mother started laughing. Not a normal laugh. High, cracked, unhinged – the sound of something snapping inside

a person and spilling out.

“WHO GAVE YOU THIS RING?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t remember his face,” I said, and my voice came out flat and strange and hard. “I don’t remember his name. I

woke up married. Congratulations, Mother. Your defective daughter did one more defective thing.”

The silence after that was enormous.

Delphine lowered her phone. My father put his head in his hands.

And my mother straightened her spine, smoothed her hair, and said the thing she’d been building toward for twenty

years.

“Get out of my house.”

“Marlene-” my father started.

“The Alpha King’s envoy arrives in nine days,” she said, still looking at me. Calm now. Business. “Nine days, David.

And I am not handing that man a pregnant bride with another wolf’s mark on her neck. We will be slaughtered.”

She turned to Delphine. And smiled.

“Pack your things, baby. You’re marrying a king.”

Delphine squealed and threw her arms around her.

And my father – the only person in that house who had ever once been kind to me – looked at the floor, and said

nothing at all.