They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 10

They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 10 The Reason Chapter 10 – The Reason

The King cleared the room.

Everyone. Except Soren and Locke, who didn’t move and wasn’t ordered to, which told me something about Kade Locke that I filed away to think about later.

“Sit down, Wren.”

“I’d rather stand.”

“Sit down anyway.”

I sat.

“You’ve been on my campus for over a year,” he said. “Your family reported you missing eleven days ago. Did you

know they were looking?”

“They called sixty-three times the day I arrived. Zero times in the year before it.” My voice came out very level. “I lived in a hunting lodge on their land for eight months, Your Majesty. Two hundred yards from my mother’s window. Nobody

knocked.”

Prince Soren swore under his breath.

The King leaned back and pressed his fingers to his mouth for a long time.

“Rhodes Ashgrove,” he said finally, “requested a private audience with me nine days ago. He walked into my house and he begged. Rhodes Ashgrove has never asked me for anything in twenty-six years.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should,” the King said. “Because he told me why.”

He nodded at Soren, who set a black lacquered box on the table and opened it.

Inside: a photograph in a cracked frame. A young woman, nineteen, high-collared dress. Black hair. My chin. My

eyebrows. My mother’s eyes.

“Seraphine Ashgrove,” the King said. “Born 1889. The last daughter born into that bloodline before you.”

The floor went a long way away.

“She’s buried in a field between Redmarch and Hollowbrook,” I said.

“Yes.” His face was grim. “You closed her case last week without knowing whose grave you were standing on

He told me the rest.

Every hundred years or so, the Ashgrove line produces a daughter. Not often – seven in three centuries. And every one of them woke on the morning of her eighteenth birthday able to do something no one is supposed to be able to do. Two heard thoughts. Two could sense a lie at fifty paces. One had perfect recall of any room she’d ever stood in.

None of them ever shifted. Not one. The gift eats the wolf.

Wolfless. Eighteen years of that word thrown at me like a stone, and it was the mark of what I am.

“And Seraphine?” I said.

“Seraphine could hear a whisper from a mile away, and a thought from the next chair.” The King’s voice was flat. “Her family kept it secret. Then she was mated to the Alpha of a great pack who swore on his blood to protect her, and within three years he’d worked out exactly what she was worth.”

Soren said quietly, “He used her to strip nine bloodlines. Trade secrets. Adultery. Debts. He’d bring men to dinner and

seat her at the table.”

“When she resisted, he broke her. Slowly. When she fell pregnant with a daughter – a daughter with the same gift – she opened her own wrists in a bathtub rather than raise a girl inside that house.” The King looked at me. “That pack still exists, Wren. It’s called Blackthorn. And they have spent a hundred and eighteen years waiting for another Ashgrove girl to be born.”

I sat there and listened to my own pulse.

“My father,” I said. “The morning after my seventeenth birthday. He shut his office door.”

“He called a meeting,” the King said. “Your mother, your brothers, and his two most trusted men. He told them everything. He told them they had three hundred and sixty-five days to prepare, because your gift would arrive the moment you turned eighteen – and that the second Blackthorn confirmed an Ashgrove daughter existed, you were as good as sold.”

“So they stopped speaking to me.”

“They stopped speaking about you,” the King said. “In every room, on every phone, in every message. Your father found a listening device in his own study nine months ago. He didn’t know how long it had been there, or who else under that roof had been bought. So they scrubbed you. Out of the conversation, out of the records, out of the calendar. They struck your name from the filings and never wrote it again. And they never explained it to you, because a seventeen-year-old who knows she’s a target behaves like a target.”

“They could have told me,” I said, and my voice cracked straight down the middle for the first time in a year. “One sentence. One. Wren, we love you, we’re protecting you, be patient.”

“Yes,” the King said. “They could have. They were wrong, and it cost them their daughter, and your father knows it

“And Damon Vance?” I said. “My fated mate rejected me in front of four hundred wolves. Was that protection too?”

The King and his son exchanged a look I did not like at all.

“Damon Vance,” Soren said carefully, “received a wire transfer from a Blackthorn shell account nine days before the Harvest Run. A rejected mate is packless. An unclaimed female with no mate bond can be taken under old law and no Alpha on this continent can legally object.”

The room went very quiet.

“He sold me,” I said.

“He sold you for a border and eleven million dollars.”

I put my face in my hands, and for about four seconds I let it hurt.

Then I sat up.

“None of that matters right now,” I said. “Something’s wrong.”

“Explain.”

“Somebody’s been getting into my quarters. No forced entry, nothing taken. Two weeks, maybe less.” I looked at

Locke. “Fourteen recruits were expelled from this campus last year. Blacklisted from every pack on the continent, with

nothing left to sell but information. One of them screamed my name in a courtyard.”

Locke’s face changed. “Corbin Shaw.”

“The Shaw pack,” I said. “Who does the Shaw pack bank with?”

The King’s expression went to stone.

“Blackthorn.”

And then the door banged open and Director Hale was standing there white as paper with a phone in his hand.

“Your Majesty. Commander. It’s the Ashgroves.” He looked at me. “They were ambushed on the coast road an hour

ago. Two of her brothers are in surgery.”

I stood up.

“And Luna Isolde is gone.”