Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 03

Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 03 — What Happens Under the Blood Moon

I didn’t ask his name. He didn’t ask mine.

That was the rule of the night I’d made up in my head somewhere between the second drink and the third.

He was tall. Dark hair, gold-brown eyes, a mouth built for cruelty and using it, instead, to make me laugh. There was a friend with him at first — smiling, generous, buying rounds. At some point the friend disappeared and I didn’t notice and later I would think about that a great deal.

We drank too much. Everything went warm and slow and gold at the edges.

“You’re not afraid of me,” he said, watching me over his glass. “Everyone is afraid of me.”

“You’re not that scary.”

“That’s the alcohol talking.”

“That’s me talking.” I leaned in. “I’ve had a very bad birthday. Be scary tomorrow.”

His jaw tightened. Something moved behind his eyes — something that wasn’t human at all. And then his hand brushed mine on the bar and it wasn’t a spark, it was a detonation, heat racing up my arm and straight into a place under my ribs that had been empty my whole life.

He froze.

“What was that,” he said. Not a question. His voice had gone rough and low and ruined.

I didn’t have an answer. Wolfless girls don’t feel the bond. Wolfless girls don’t feel anything.

But my whole body was singing.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. He looked down at his own hands like they belonged to someone else. “The drinks. I don’t— I never lose control. I have not lost control in eleven years—”

“Then don’t.” I stood up. My legs were water. “Or do.”

He caught me at the elevator. Or I caught him. Honestly the order got lost. There was a rooftop, a private lift, a suite with a wall of black glass and the desert burning orange below it, and his mouth on mine, and the sound he made when I pulled his shirt over his head — half growl, half prayer.

“Say it again,” he said against my throat. “Tell me you want this. Say it so I remember you said it.”

“I want this.”

He kissed me like he was starving. Like the world was ending at dawn and he intended to spend all of it on me. His hands mapped every inch of me, slow first, then not slow at all, until I forgot my name, my house, my mother’s cake and my father’s silence and the King I was supposed to be handed to like a set of keys.

Sometime in the dark, he pressed his mouth to the curve where my neck met my shoulder and I felt his teeth.

“Do you know what I’m asking?” he whispered.

I said yes.

I don’t know if I understood. But I said yes.

The bite went through me like lightning through a wire. I arched, I cried out, and somewhere deep inside my chest, in a place that had been silent for twenty years, something woke up and howled.

He held me while I shook. He said words over me in the old tongue, low and reverent, and somewhere in there I heard mine, mine, mine.

At some point there were papers. A man at the door in a suit at four in the morning. Heavy cream paper and a black seal and a pen pressed into my drunk, shaking hand.

“Sign,” he murmured against my hair, laughing, half wrecked. “Sign it before you sober up and run.”

I signed. I have no idea what.

“Where’s my ring?” I asked, giggling, because there was a ring on his hand now and I could not remember buying it.

“Yours is special,” he said. “Yours has to come from the vault.”

Then I slept.

Morning came like a punishment.

Sunlight. A pounding skull. Sheets that cost more than my car. And a man asleep beside me whose face I still — even now, staring straight at the back of his head — could not make myself look at.

I got up. Pain shot through me, deep and sore and humiliating.

My dress was on the floor. I dragged it on, grabbed my bag, and did not breathe until the elevator doors closed.

Back in my own room I stood under scalding water for twenty minutes trying to wash off a night I couldn’t remember the middle of. Then I lifted my head, and the mirror caught something at my throat.

I went very still.

A mark. Not a bruise. A brand — silver-white, curling like frost and fire, glowing faintly against my skin.

A mating mark.

And under the water, on my left hand, a ring I hadn’t been wearing yesterday: heavy old silver, a blood-red stone at its center burning like something alive.

I searched every database I had access to for that crest.

I got one result.

Restricted. Royal House.