The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 06

The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 06 Ember

Ravenspire is not a house. It’s a fortress pretending to be a house.

We came up a mile of black driveway at two in the morning and the whole place was lit up like a landing strip, and there were four men standing in the open doorway.

I stopped walking at the bottom of the steps.

“That’s a lot of people,” I said.

“That’s your family,” my father said. “Take your time. They’ll wait all night. They’ve been waiting all night.”

The biggest one came down first. Late twenties, black hair, a jaw like a closed door, and he was holding a coffee cup so hard I could hear the ceramic complaining.

“Rafe,” Cassian said. “Eldest.”

Rafe stopped two steps up from me. Looked at me. Looked at the sleeve I’d pulled back down over my

arm.

“You’re the reason I’ve been sober for eleven hours,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“Don’t.” He crouched so we were eye to eye, which for a man like him must have been humiliating, and he didn’t touch me. “You have my mother’s chin. Do you know that? You have Mom’s chin and Dad’s everything else, which is honestly rude of you.”

Something in my throat unlocked.

Then the other three hit me like weather.

Killian – Cassian’s twin, longer hair, wilder eyes – got there first and just said “hi hi hi hi hi” and hovered his hands around me like I was radioactive. Nico, twenty-two, held out a plate. An actual plate. “I made grilled cheese. I made nine grilled cheeses. I didn’t know what you liked.”

And Theo, nineteen, the youngest, who I’d apparently displaced as the baby of the family, stood there with his hands jammed in his hoodie pocket and his eyes absolutely streaming.

“You’re so small,” he said. “Why are you so small?”

VELING

“Theo,” Rafe said.

“No, I mean – she’s tiny, why is she what did they do to her-”

“Theo. Go inside.”

He went inside. I heard something break in the entryway about four seconds later.

“He’ll be fine,” Nico said. “Grilled cheese?”

I took a grilled cheese. My hands shook so hard I dropped half of it, and four grown men lunged to catch it, and that’s how I met my brothers.

Cassian examined me at four in the morning in a medical suite that was nicer than any hospital I’d ever

seen.

He was completely professional right up until I took my shirt off.

Then he had to walk out of the room.

He came back ninety seconds later with red eyes and steady hands and did his job: two cracked ribs, one old break that had healed wrong, a partially dislocated shoulder I’d been walking on for two days, malnutrition, anemia, and silver toxicity at a level he described as “incompatible with an ordinary lifespan.”

And then he found it.

He’d been mapping the scars on my back and he suddenly went quiet, and then he said, “Ember. Hold still.”

He photographed it. He put the photo on the wall screen.

It wasn’t a scar pattern. Not random.

It was a design. Cut into the skin between my shoulder blades, over and over, deepened and re-opened year after year, in silver. Three interlocking crescents inside a ring.

“That’s a binding sigil,” Cassian said. “That’s very old and very illegal and it takes a trained hand to carve. It’s not a beating. It’s a procedure.”

“So someone paid Garrick,” I said.

“Someone taught Garrick.” He turned around. “Someone who knew what you were. Who wanted you alive,

wolfless, powerless, and buried in a nothing pack in Colorado for seventeen years.”

That’s when my father spoke from the doorway.

I didn’t know how long he’d been standing there. Long enough. His face was a mask and his hands were bleeding, and I looked past him and saw the doorframe had a fist-shaped hole in it.

“Selene didn’t run from me,” he said.

“Dad-”

“She ran with her.” His voice was barely holding. “Pregnant, four months, no money, no name. She let me believe she abandoned me for seventeen years. She let me hate her.” He looked at me. “She did that to protect you from something. And whatever she was protecting you from – it found you anyway, and it was

in that house.”

I sat there on the exam table holding my shirt against my chest and thought about my mother crying in the

bathroom with the faucet running.

Mom. What did you know?

“There’s more,” Cassian said quietly. “Dad. The sigil’s been maintained on a schedule. Roughly every six weeks. Which means whoever set it has been checking on her. Regularly.”

Silence.

“For eleven years,” Cassian said. “Somebody’s been driving to Colorado every six weeks for eleven years.

That’s not Garrick.”

My father went very still.

“Then he’s still coming,” he said.