The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 08

The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 08 – Ember

We were in the air in forty minutes.

My father did not shout. That was the frightening part. He walked through his own house making phone calls in a level, pleasant voice, and by the time we boarded, three hundred wolves were moving across two

states.

“Cassian goes for the boy,” he said. “Rafe and Killian take the town. Nico, the hospital records – I want every name that has touched that child’s file. Theo stays with your sister.”

“I’m going in,” I said.

Five heads turned.

“Absolutely not,” said four of them.

My father just looked at me for a long moment.

“He’ll be scared,” I said. “He doesn’t do doctors. He doesn’t do strangers. If someone he doesn’t know grabs him he will fight and he will hurt himself, and he has cracked ribs from January, and nobody in this family knows the song.”

“The song,” my father repeated.

“Our mom’s song. It’s the only thing that gets him through the injections.”

Something crossed my father’s face – grief so raw it was hard to look at.

“Sing it,” he said.

I sang four lines. Badly. In Italian, phonetically, the way a woman with a Colorado accent had taught it to

me before I understood the words.

By the third line, my father had turned his face to the window and Rafe had walked to the back of the

plane.

“That’s Nonna’s lullaby,” Nico whispered. “She sang us that.”

“She sang me that too,” I said.

My father wiped his face with his hand and said, “She goes in. With me. Behind me, but with me.”

We landed at 1 a.m. Thursday.

The private wing was silent. Too silent. There should have been a nurse at the desk and there wasn’t, and Kade’s four men were exactly where they should be, standing at their posts, and not one of them turned around when we came in.

“Dad,” Cassian said quietly.

He crossed to the nearest guard and touched his shoulder, and the man went down like a dropped coat.

Drugged. All four of them. Aerosol, Cassian said later. Something surgical. Something expensive.

I was already running.

Room 4. Door open. Bed empty. Blankets thrown back and still warm, IV line pulled and dripping onto the

floor, one small gray beanie sitting on the pillow.

I made a sound I didn’t recognize.

“Ember-”

“He never takes it off.” I had it in my fists. “He never he doesn’t let anyone see his head, he wouldn’t

leave it, he wouldn’t-”

Rafe found the note.

It was tucked under the beanie, on hospital notepaper, in beautiful old-fashioned handwriting, the kind

they don’t teach anymore.

I read it over my father’s shoulder because he couldn’t stop me.

Lyall,

You should have let her stay lost.

The boy is insurance. The girl is inventory. Bring her to the old chapel at Ashborne Ridge at dawn, alone, and the boy walks out. Bring anyone, and I’ll open her sigil myself and let it finish what it was designed to

You never could tell family from furniture. Neither could Selene, in the end.

My father read it three times.

Then he sat down on the edge of my brother’s empty hospital bed, the Alpha King of the Northern

Territories, and put his head in his hands.

“Dad,” Rafe said. “Who’s S?”

“Soren,” my father said.

Nico dropped the tablet he was holding.

“Uncle Soren’s dead,” Theo said. “He died before I was born. There’s a statue-

“He’s my brother,” my father said, to the floor. “He was my Beta. He was the only other person alive who

knew Selene was pregnant when she disappeared.” He raised his head, and his eyes were gold and wet and absolutely empty. “And he’s the only man in this family who was ever trained in old blood-sigil work.”

I looked down at the beanie in my hands.

Inventory.

“He’s not keeping me alive to protect anything,” I said slowly. “Cassian – the binding. If it isn’t just a cage. If it’s a storage device-”

Cassian’s face changed.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, God.”

“What,” Rafe snapped. “What.”

“A binding sigil doesn’t destroy a wolf’s power,” Cassian said. “It holds it. Eleven years of a royal Alpha bloodline, compressed, contained and growing, in one seventeen-year-old girl who has never once been allowed to release any of it.”

He looked at me like he’d never seen me before.

“Ember,” he said. “You’re not a prisoner. You’re a battery.”

“And on Sunday,” my father said hoarsely, “she turns eighteen.”