Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 07

Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 07 – Two Heartbeats

I didn’t sleep.

At 6 a.m. Sable had the entire floor swept – drones, cameras, thermal, everything. Nothing. No prints on the glass.

No scent in the stairwell.

“Whoever took it was hovering,” she said grimly. “Silent rotor. That’s military. Or royal.”

“Or a fan,” I said, which was a joke, and neither of us laughed.

She drove me to the clinic that afternoon. Off–books, run by a retired pack healer named Orla who took cash and

asked exactly zero questions and had a smoker’s laugh that could strip paint.

I lay back on the table. Cold gel. The wand moved.

“Well,” Orla said.

“Well?”

“Well, that’s two.”

Everything in me stopped. “Two what?”

She turned the screen toward me. Two shapes. Two flickers, fast as hummingbirds, out of sync with each other by

half a beat.

“Twins,” Orla said. “Ten weeks, give or take, and both of them are strong as hell. Congratulations.”

I put my hand over my mouth and did not cry, and then cried anyway.

“Now the part you’ll hate,” Orla went on, wiping the wand. “Look at the growth curve. That’s not a normal shifter pregnancy. These two are developing about thirty percent fast. I’ve seen that curve exactly once in my career.”

“When?”

“When I worked at the royal birthing house in Draven territory.” She met my eyes over her glasses. “It’s an Alpha bloodline marker, girl. High Alpha. The kind that comes with a crown attached.”

I looked at the ring on my hand.

“Orla. Can a marked mate feel her mate?”

“Yes.”

“Even if she couldn’t feel anything before?”

“Especially then.” Orla peeled off her gloves. “A true mark doesn’t create a bond. It opens a door that was already there. If he marked you and you took it, you two didn’t meet by accident in that bar. You were always going to end up in

the same room. Fate’s a bully like that.”

“So I’d know,” I said slowly, “if he was near me.”

“You’d know if he was in the same city.”

That night I fought at the Bloodmoon.

Mask on, hands taped, a nobody from a Colorado outfit across from me who telegraphed every hook he threw. I put him down in ninety seconds and the mine went insane and Sable held up four fingers from the tunnel – one down,

three to go.

I was climbing out of the cage when it hit me.

Heat. Straight through the mark on my throat, so sharp I gasped and grabbed the fencing. Not pain. Pull. Like a hook set behind my collarbone and something on the other end of the line pulling steady, patient, inevitable.

My wolf surged up so fast I nearly went to my knees.

MATE. HERE. NOW.

I turned.

Fifteen hundred faces in the dark, and I found him instantly – because he was the only one not moving. Upper tier,

back row, black mask, hands loose on the rail.

The Phantom.

He tipped his head at me. Slowly.

Then he raised two fingers to the side of his mask, exactly like the night I put him on the floor, and my whole body

remembered a rooftop and a mouth on my throat and a voice saying sign it before you sober up and run.

I was over the cage wall and running before I knew I’d decided to.

I hit the upper tier in twenty seconds.

He was gone.

But on the rail where his hands had been, someone had left a small black box.

I opened it under the arena lights with my ears ringing.

A ring. Silver, ancient, a blood–red stone burning at its center – the twin of the one on my hand, sized for a woman, resting on a folded card.

The card said:

“Yours is special, remember? It had to come from the vault. – R.”