Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 06

Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 06 – I’m Pregnant, Not Fragile

I didn’t speak for the entire elevator ride.

Forty–one floors. My reflection stared back at me from the polished doors – a girl in someone else’s sweatpants with

a king’s ring on her hand and a king’s mark on her throat and a king’s bride being fitted for a dress across town.

“It’s not possible,” I finally said.

“Which part?”

“All of it. He was in a bar, Sable. He was drinking with a friend. Kings don’t sit in bars.”

“Men do,” Sable said. “Even the ones who are also kings.”

The penthouse doors opened into glass and light and a view that went on forever. I stood in the middle of it and, for

the first time in six weeks, breathed all the way down.

“Okay,” I said. “Get my team back.”

Sable looked up from her tablet. “For what?”

“I’m fighting.”

She put the tablet down. “Absolutely not.”

“Sable-”

“You are pregnant.”

“I’m pregnant, not fragile.” I turned around. “I have eight weeks before I show. In eight weeks I need untraceable

housing, a clean identity, medical care that doesn’t report to a pack registry, and enough liquid cash to disappear with a

baby. You know what buys all that fast? The Bloodmoon.”

“You have millions.”

“In accounts my father’s name is still attached to.” I saw her face change. “Yeah. He co–signed everything when I was

seventeen. My mother will freeze it before the week is out just to prove she can. Bloodmoon pays in cash, same night,

no bank, no name.”

Sable was quiet for a long moment. Then: “Three fights. Not eleven. Three.”

“Six.”

“Four, and a doctor at every one, and if I say stop, you stop.”

“Deal.”

She started typing. Then stopped. “And when the King’s people come for you? Because they will, Wren. That mark is his signature. Wolves can smell it. The second you step in a ring-”

“I’ll wear the mask.” I touched my throat. The mark was warm under my fingers, and it had been warmer every day since the test. “And Sable? He hasn’t come for me in six weeks. Six weeks with a whole kingdom’s worth of trackers. He knows exactly where he left me and he didn’t bother.”

“Or someone made sure he couldn’t find you.”

I didn’t like how that landed in my chest.

That night I lay in a bed that was mine, in a room that was mine, with my hand flat on a stomach that was still flat,

and I said out loud, to no one:

“It’s going to be you and me. That’s it. That’s the whole team.”

And something answered.

Not out loud. Deeper than that. A warmth uncurling under my ribs, a stretch, a shape – like a creature that had been asleep my entire life rolling over and opening one eye.

You’re not wolfless, something said, in a voice that was mine and wasn’t. You were waiting.

I sat straight up in the dark, heart hammering.

Wolfless. Twenty years of that word. Twenty years of my mother’s face, my sister’s pity, the pack’s polite disgust. Twenty years of a silence I’d been told was a defect.

And now, six weeks after a stranger sank his teeth into my throat, my wolf was awake.

I laughed. It came out shaky.

Then my burner phone lit up on the nightstand.

Unknown number. No text. Just a photograph.

Me. Last night. Standing at this window, forty–one floors up, in this room.

Taken from outside.

And underneath it, three words:

“Hello, little Ghost.”