The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 09

The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 09 – Ember

Here’s what nobody tells you about being raised by a monster: you get very, very good at knowing what monsters actually want.

“He won’t hurt Milo,” I said in the car at 3 a.m

“Ember-”

“He won’t. Not before dawn.” My voice was flat and calm and it scared even me. “Milo’s the only leash he has on me. You don’t cut your own leash.” I looked at my father. “And he wants me to come alone, which means whatever he’s going to do needs me conscious and consenting. Cassian – can you force a sigil open on someone who fights it?”

Cassian was quiet a beat too long. “No. Blood work requires the subject’s blood to move willingly. Fear works. Love works better.”

“That’s why he took a seven-year-old,” I said. “He needs me to walk in there and want something.”

My father’s hands closed on the seat in front of him until the leather split.

“So we give him what he expects,” Rafe said. “She walks in.”

“Rafe-”

“She walks in,” Rafe said, “with four hundred wolves in the treeline and a doctor twelve feet behind her and an Ashborne sniper on the ridge who has been begging for this since Tuesday.”

Kade, from the front seat: “Confirmed.”

“No,” my father said.

“Dad.”

“No.” He turned on all of us and his voice shook the windows. “I have known her for six days. Six. I am not sending my daughter into-”

“You’re not sending me,” I said.

I put my hand over his. It was the first time I’d touched him on purpose.

He went still like I’d stopped his heart.

“I’ve been walking into that room my whole life,” I said. “Every single day since I was nine. The only difference is that this time, somebody’s coming with me.”

He turned his hand over and gripped mine, and he didn’t say yes.

But he didn’t say no again either.

Dawn at Ashborne Ridge was gray and wet and beautiful.

The old chapel was three hundred years old, roofless, ringed with pines. The trees were full of my family and I couldn’t hear a single one of them.

I walked up the aisle alone.

Milp was sitting on the altar stone with his knees pulled up, no beanie, in a hospital gown, blue with cold.

Beside him stood a man who looked exactly like my father.

Older. Thinner. Grayer, Same green eyes, but wrong – flat, like glass over a hole.

“Ember,” Soren Draven said warmly. “Look at you. You’ve got Selene’s chin.”

“Let him go.”

“In a moment.” He tipped his head. “You don’t remember me at all, do you? Eleven years, forty-two visits, and you never once woke up.” He smiled. “I’m very good at what I do.”

“Em,” Milo said. “Your left.”

Soren’s hand closed on the back of Milo’s neck.

“Manners,” he said mildly.

I saw red. Actual red – the whole clearing went crimson at the edges and something huge rolled over in my chest, something that had been asleep under eleven years of silver, and Soren’s eyes widened with pure, undisguised hunger.

“There she is,” he breathed. “Do you feel that? That’s mine. I built that. Your mother’s genes, my craftsmanship.” He drew a silver blade the length of my forearm. “Eighteen years old on Sunday, and it

comes out of you whether we like it or not. It burns off. Wasted. Unless-”

“Unless somebody’s holding the other end when it opens,” I said.

He looked delighted. “You are his.”-

“You couldn’t beat my father,” I said. “So you grew a weapon in a kitchen in Colorado for seventeen years.”

“I grew a daughter,” he said, and for one second something almost human moved behind the glass. “Selene came to me first, you know. Pregnant, terrified, begging her husband’s Beta for help. And I gave it. I hid her. I kept her.” His face closed again. “Ungrateful, in the end. They always are. Kneel, Ember.”

“Let him go first.”

“Kneel.”

“Let him go-”

“Em,” Milo said. “It’s okay.”

And my seven-year-old brother – bald, freezing, forty-two pounds, with a killer’s hand on his neck – looked past me into the treeline, straight at the pine where my father was standing, and said, very clearly:

“I told you you’d come back on your knees.”

Then he bit down on Soren’s wrist as hard as he could.