The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 11

The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 11 – Ember

They gave Soren Draven a trial.

I want to be clear about that, because I think most people expect the mafia-king version of this story where somebody disappears into a lake. My father wanted that. Rafe wanted that so badly he stopped speaking for two days.

But my father stood in the war room at Ravenspire and said, “She’s not going to spend the rest of her life as the girl a murder was committed for. She gets it clean.”

So it was clean. A council tribunal, eleven Alphas, forty hours of evidence, and me on a witness stand in a navy dress Nico picked out, describing a kitchen table and a silver buckle and forty-two Thursdays I could not remember.

Halfway through, my father had to leave the room.

The verdict took nine minutes.

Garrick Vale was found four days later in a motel outside Reno by Killian, who was told very explicitly not to enjoy himself and who I have never asked about.

We buried my mother’s name that autumn.

Not her body – she’s in Colorado, in a plot with a plastic marker that said VALE, and my father had that changed within a week.

But her name. Her real one.

There’s a marble wall at Ravenspire with every Draven Luna carved into it, going back nine generations, and there was a gap where Selene’s should have been, Seventeen years of a gap, because a family had decided she was a woman who abandoned her sons.

My father stood in front of that wall with a letter in his hand.

We’d found it in the lining of my mother’s old coat. I’d carried that coat for six years and never known.

He read it out loud to all seven of us.

Lyall,

If you are reading this, then I am dead and someone has found our daughter, and I am so sorry, my love. I

am su, so sorry.

Soren came to me the week I found out I was pregnant. He told me what the seers told him – that the ninth-generation daughter would carry the whole line’s strength, and that whoever held her held the North. He told me he could keep her safe. He told me you would use her.

I believed him for one night. That was my sin. By morning I was already gone, and by the time I understood he was the danger, he owned everything I had, including my name.

I could not come home. He promised me that the day I did, you would open the door and find your five

sons on the step.

So I stayed. And I gave her your name so that one day somebody would say it out loud in front of the right

person.

Mirabella. Ember. Both. She’s had four names in six years, and every one of them was a place to hide.

Tell her I was never ashamed of her. Tell her I was afraid, which is different, and worse.

Tell my boys their mother did not choose. Tell them she was outplayed.

Love them louder than I got to.

– Selene

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Theo- nineteen, six foot two, the baby – sat down on the grass and cried like he was five, and Rafe went down beside him and put his arms around his head, and watched my four other brothers grieve a woman they’d been forbidden to grieve for seventeen years.

My father knelt in front of that wall and put his palm flat on the empty stone.

“Carve it,” he said. “All of it. Selene Draven, Luna of the North. She was outplayed. She was never disloyal.”

Then he looked up at me with his eyes streaming and said, “Come here, principessa.”

And I went, because it doesn’t hurt anymore to be touched.

Well.

It hurts less.

That night I couldn’t sleep, so I went down to the kitchen at 2 a.m. and found Kade Ashborne sitting at the island in a T-shirt, eating cereal out of a mixing bowl.

“Your father hates me,” he said.

“My father hates everyone.”

“Your father hates me specifically,” Kade said, “because two weeks ago the bond snapped into place in his front hallway and he watched it happen.”

I put down my glass.

“The what,” I said.