The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 14

The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 14- Ember

He didn’t touch me for a full thirty seconds.

He just stood there behind that desk with his hands flat on it, looking at me like a man checking whether he’d finally lost his mind.

“You’re supposed to be in Rome,” he said.

“I came back in March.”

“I know,” he said. “I know exactly when you came back. I’ve known every day where you were for four years and I never once-” He stopped. “Ember. Say what you came to say. Please. I’ve got a nine-figure merger in that room and I genuinely do not care.”

So I said it.

“I got the degrees. I learned what my face looks like when it isn’t scared. I bought a car I can’t afford and I fight with Rafe about the TV every Sunday.” My voice wobbled and I let it. “And I walked into a room today and my heart did the thing.”

He came around the desk.

“Four years,” he said.

“You said you’d be where I left you.”

“I said it,” he agreed, “and then I lay awake for approximately fourteen hundred nights wondering if I’d been noble or just stupid-”

I kissed him.

For the record, I kissed him first. Nico still doesn’t believe me, and Kade has stopped correcting him, because he says the story’s better with Nico furious.

My father cried at the mating ceremony.

Loudly. In front of eleven Alphas and both councils. Rafe had to hand him a handkerchief twice, and then Rafe needed it, and then it just became a bucket brigade of enormous crying men in three-thousand-dollar

suits.

Milo, eleven years old, walked me down the aisle.

That was my father’s idea, which is the single most beautiful thing that man has ever done. He said, “He kept her alive first. He goes first.”

Milo held my hand the whole way and didn’t say a single smart thing.

Then, at the very end, right before he handed me over, he stood on his toes and whispered:

“I told you one of us should get out.”

“We both got out,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I meant.”

I have a daughter now.

She’s two. She’s got Kade’s mouth and my green eyes and her great-grandmother’s chin, and she has never

in her life been afraid of a raised hand, because she has never seen one.

She calls my father Nonno and he takes her to the office and lets her sign things.

We named her Selene.

Last week she found the pink dolphin plush in my closet – bald in patches, restitched four times, seventeen years old – and asked if she could have it.

I said yes.

I sat on the floor of that closet afterward and cried for about ten minutes, and then I went downstairs, because there were nine people in my kitchen and Nico had made too much food and Theo was arguing with Killian about the TV and Milo had bitten someone and my father was on the porch calling my name.

“Principessa? Come here. I want to show you something.”

I went.

I always go.

If you’re the girl on the roof: I know it’s cold and I know the voice in your head is very loud tonight.

But there is a phone ringing somewhere in a city you’ve never seen. There is a man with your face who has

been looking for seventeen years. There are people who will kneel on a dirty police station floor the first time they see you.

They just haven’t found your address yet.

Hold on.

Hold on for four more months.

– Mirabella Ember Lyall Draven

THE END