Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 12

Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 12 – The Wedding That Wasn’t

He would not let me come.

I came anyway, obviously, in a wheelchair, in a hospital gown with a coat over it, with two healers and Sable and eight royal guards and the King of the werewolves personally pushing the chair.

The Silvercreek estate was decorated within an inch of its life. Four hundred guests. A twelve–piece orchestra. My mother had put a swan ice sculpture in the foyer.

The doors opened and the room went to its knees.

Everyone except my mother, who was too busy sailing toward us in taffeta with her arms open and her smile at full

wattage.

“Your Majesty! We were beginning to worry- Delphine is nearly ready, she looks like an angel-”

Then she saw me.

I watched her face do something extraordinary. Joy, confusion, recognition, and pure animal terror, all in about a

second and a half.

“Wren,” she said. “What is–why is she-”

“Mrs. Vale,” Rune said, and the ballroom went so quiet I could hear the orchestra’s conductor swallow. “Allow me to

introduce my wife.”

Four hundred people inhaled at once.

“Your-” My mother laughed. It was the cracked, spilling–out laugh. “That’s not Your Majesty, that’s my eldest. She’s

wolfless. She’s pregnant by some stranger from a bar, she’s a disgrace, we removed her from this house precisely so

that-”

“You removed her from this house,” Rune said, “at eleven weeks pregnant, barefoot, in a bathrobe, in forty–degree

weather.”

Silence.

“You struck her while she carried my heirs.”

Somebody at the back of the room made a small noise.

“You told an entire territory that a royal sleeper wolf was defective,” Rune went on, still perfectly calm, and that was

somehow worse than shouting, “because it was easier than admitting your favorite child was the lesser one.”

Delphine appeared at the top of the stairs in her wedding dress.

She saw me in the wheelchair. She saw Rune’s hands on the handles. And she screamed – actually screamed, and

threw the bouquet down the stairs.

“You ruin everything,” she shrieked at me. “You always ruin everything-”

“Delphine,” my father said.

It was the first thing he’d said. He’d been standing by the window the entire time, grey–faced, holding a glass he hadn’t

drunk from.

He set the glass down. He walked across that ballroom past four hundred kneeling guests. And he stopped in front of my chair and got down on his knees, and I realized with a sick lurch that my father was crying.

“I turned away,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You looked at me and I turned away.”

“Yes.”

He bowed his head. “I don’t want anything. I’m not asking for anything. I just needed you to hear me say I know what I

did.”

I looked at him for a long time.

“Okay,” I said. And that was all I had, and he nodded like he understood, and he stayed on his knees.

Rune addressed the room.

“The northern treaty stands,” he said. “The bride named in it is the one I married eleven weeks ago, under royal seal, of

her own free will. Marlene Vale is stripped of pack title and removed from Silvercreek lands by sundown. Delphine Vale is barred from the royal territories for ten years.”

My mother started screaming.

Two guards escorted her out through the swan.

And me? I sat in a hospital gown in a wheelchair in a ballroom built for my sister’s triumph, holding my husband’s

hand, and felt my wolf stretch out inside me – enormous, awake, and finally, finally not silent.

Which is when the pain hit.