The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 07

The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 07-Ember

I didn’t sleep in the bed.

They gave me a room the size of my old house, with a private bathroom and a window seat and a walk-in closet that Nico had already filled with clothes in my size, which he’d guessed by looking at me and getting it wrong in the sweetest possible way – everything one size too big, “so you can grow into it.”

I slept on the floor beside the bed with my dolphin plush, because that’s what my body knows.

At six a.m. someone knocked.

“It’s Rafe. I’m not coming in.”

“Okay?”

“You’re on the floor, aren’t you.”

I didn’t answer.

There was a long pause, and then I heard him sit down with his back against my door, out in the hallway.

“Cool,” he said. “Then I’m out here.”

He stayed there for four hours.

That’s the day I stopped waiting for the catch.

Kade Ashborne arrived on day two.

I came around the corner of the east hall and there he was in the entry, talking to my father, and he turned and looked at me and every single hair on my arms stood up.

Not fear. Something else. Something like standing too close to a live wire.

He felt it too. I watched him grab the back of a chair.

“You,” I said.

“Me.”

“You called them.”

“I called your father from a parking lot in Colorado and told him I’d found a girl with his face who smelled like silver and starvation, Kade said. “Then I called our security division and had them pull every camera in that town.” His jaw tightened “Ember. Marla wasn’t killed by Garrick.”

The floor went out from under me for the second time that week.

“What?”

He put a tablet on the table. Grainy footage of my kitchen window from the neighbor’s doorbell camera. Timestamp 4:11 p.m. Marla, arguing with someone I couldn’t see. Garrick in the corner with his hands up – Garrick, with his hands up, terrified.

And then a third figure crossing the frame. Tall. Dark coat. Face turned away.

“He killed her,” Kade said. “Garrick ran because he was next!”

“Why would anyone-”

“Because that morning, an Ashborne heir walked into that lodge and said your middle name out loud in

front of forty people,” Kade said. “Somebody heard. Somebody who has been keeping you invisible for

seventeen years panicked, went to that house, and started cleaning up witnesses.”

I sat down on the arm of a couch.

“Then it’s my fault she’s dead.”

“No. It’s his.”

“And Milo is in a hospital in the same town.” I was already standing. “Alone. With a name and a schedule

and a record-”

“He has four of my men on that wing,” Kade said. “He’s fine.”

But something on his face wasn’t right.

“Kade.”

“He’s fine,” Kade repeated. “He’s just… he’s asked for you twice, and both times he told my guard the same thing.”

“What thing?”

Kade hesitated.

“He said, ‘Tell Ember the man with the cold hands is coming Thursday. He always comes on Thursdays.”

The room tilted.

Every six weeks. Every six weeks for eleven years, somebody drove to Colorado and re-opened the carving on my back.

I had never once been able to remember it happening. Not once. I’d wake up with fresh blood on my sheets and no memory, and Garrick would say I’d fallen.

But Milo remembered.

Milo, who was four years old and small enough to hide under the sink, had been watching a stranger cut symbols into his sister for three years and had never said a word, because the one time he’d tried to scream, Garrick had held his head under the bathwater.

He’d told me go. He’d told my father you’ll come back on your knees.

He wasn’t being creepy. He was buying me seven days

He knew exactly what he’d be alone with on Thursday,

“What day is it,” I said.

Kade’s face said everything.

“It’s Wednesday,” he said.