Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 08

Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 08 – The Envoy

I didn’t go back to the penthouse. Sable moved me to a safehouse in the hills and I sat on the kitchen floor at 3 a.m.

with two rings in front of me like evidence at a trial.

Rune Draven.

I said it out loud to the empty room. My wolf sang.

“Okay,” I told her. “Great. Fantastic. He’s the man my parents sold me to at sixteen, he’s the fighter I humiliated in front of fifteen hundred people, he’s the stranger who got me pregnant, and he’s currently four days out from marrying my

sister. Any thoughts?”

She had one thought. She had exactly one thought and it was MINE and it was extremely unhelpful.

“He left me,” I said. “He marked me and he left me and he let six weeks go by.”

Silence. Then something in my chest, low and certain: Then why is he here?

Sable came in at dawn with her jaw tight and her tablet already open.

“Turn on the news.”

Every channel. Same footage. A motorcade of eight black vehicles rolling through the gates of the Silvercreek estate – my estate, my father’s house and a line of royal guard in grey stepping out in perfect formation.

“The King’s envoy,” Sable said. “Arrived early. Six days early.”

The camera caught my mother on the front steps in ivory, radiant, gripping Delphine’s arm like a trophy. My sister

waved. She actually waved.

And then a man in a grey suit came up the drive. Tall, sharp–featured, smiling the sort of smile that has never once

been sincere.

Everything in me went cold.

“That’s him,” I whispered.

“Who?”

“The friend.” I was on my feet. “Sable, that’s the man who was buying our drinks. That’s the one who disappeared

before-”

Sable’s face lost its color. She scrolled. Read. Read again.

“Theodore Marrick,” she said. “Royal Beta. Second–in–command of House Draven. He’s been running the King’s affairs for eleven years.”

The room tilted.

I think my friend spiked our drinks. He’d said that. Wrecked, laughing, half out of his mind, holding my face like he

was afraid of himself. I never lose control.

“He drugged his own king,” I said.

“Why?”

“To make him do something stupid.” My hands were shaking. “To make him mark a random girl in a bar so the

northern treaty collapses and the King’s marriage falls apart and everybody blames Rune.”

“Except you weren’t random,” Sable said quietly.

I stopped.

“You were the girl the King was already promised to,” she said. “Wren. What if Marrick knew exactly who you were?

What if he put the two of you in that bar on purpose?”

On screen, Theodore Marrick shook my father’s hand, said something that made my mother laugh, and then turned

and looked directly into the news camera.

Straight down the lens.

And smiled.

My phone lit up on the counter. Unknown number.

Four words:

“He knows about the twins.”