The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 13

The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 13-Ember

Milo was standing at the top of the aisle in a suit.

They’d had it made. Tiny black tie. Hair growing back in thick dark curls he still hides under the beanie half

the time out of habit.

My father hadn’t told me. He’d told him, though-three weeks earlier, apparently, over breakfast, and the little demon had kept it secret from me the entire time.

“Presented for adoption into the blood,” my father said, “and for a name.”

Milo walked all the way down alone. Nine hundred people watching. Seven years old.

He didn’t hurry, either.

He stopped at the stone and my father crouched down in front of him, and the whole valley heard the

Alpha King ask a small boy:

“Do you want me?”

Milo considered it. He genuinely considered it, for about four seconds, and I saw Rafe put his hand over

his mouth.

“Yeah,” Milo said. “You’re late, but yeah.”

My father laughed – that shocked, broken bark of a laugh, the same one from the police station – and then he pulled my brother into his chest and held the back of his head and didn’t let go for a long, long time.

“Milo Draven,” he said, when he could speak. “Seventh child. Youngest son. If anyone in this valley ever says he isn’t mine, send them to me.”

Nobody has ever said it.

Here’s what happened after, because I know you want to know.

Milo’s blood work came back clean at four months. Not remission – clean, because he was never sick, he was poisoned, and bodies that young forgive fast. He shifted for the first time at nine years old, which is still ridiculously early, and he’s small and black and unbelievably fast and he has bitten every single one of

my brothers at least once.

Cassian wrote a paper on the sigil. Anonymized It’s now taught in three medical programs, and last year a nurse in Oregon recognized the burn pattern on a nine-year-old’s back and made a phone call. That girl lives. with her grandmother now. She sends me drawings.

I finished my degree. Then took a second one, because it turns out that when you’re not spending all your

energy on survival, you have an obscene amount of it.

Rafe still doesn’t drink. Four years and counting. He says he doesn’t want to be asleep for any of it.

Nico still cooks too much food.

Theo introduced me to his girlfriend by saying “this is my sister, she blew out a three-hundred-year-old

window, don’t make her mad.”

And my father –

My father called me every single night for four years. Every night, even when I was six thousand miles away doing a semester in Rome, even when it was 4 a.m. his time. Never a long call. Usually thirty seconds.

“Are you safe?”

“I’m safe, Dad.”

“Good. Buonanotte, principessa.”

Seventeen years he didn’t get to say goodnight to me.

He’s making them up one at a time.

There’s one more thing, and it’s the reason I’m telling you all okthis.

On my twenty-second birthday, I drove up to Ashborne Ridge by myself.

The chapel’s been rebuilt. My father did it quietly the first year – new roof, new window, no plaque, because he said the last thing I needed was a monument to the worst morning of my life.

I sat in the back pew for a while. I thought about a girl on a roof in Colorado who was very sure that nobody in the world was coming for her.

I’d like to tell her something, if I could get a message three stories up.

They were coming. They just didn’t know your address.

Hold on. Hold on for four more months. Hold on for one more Tuesday.

Somebody is going to walk into your lobby and say your middle name out loud, and everything is going to change so fast you won’t be able to breathe.

Then I got up, and drove down the ridge, and pulled into the Ashborne offices at 4 p.m. on a Thursday, and walked past a receptionist who tried very hard to stop me.

Kade was in a meeting with eleven people.

He looked up.

His heart did that thing. I watched it happen on his face.

“Everybody out,” he said.