The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 10

The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 10 –Ember

Everything happened in three seconds.

Soren roared and threw him. Milo hit the altar stone shoulder-first and slid to the floor, and I heard the

sound his body made, and something inside me tore.

Not metaphorically.

Between my shoulder blades, eleven years of silver split open like a seam.

I have no words for it. It was fire and it was drowning and it was every single scream I never let out of my mouth since I was nine years old, all leaving at once.

The stained-glass window that had survived three centuries blew out into the trees.

Soren was thrown thirty feet.

And I stood in the middle of a chapel full of white light with my mother’s lullaby in my ears and a wolf – my wolf, silver-white, ancient, furious – rising up behind my eyes and saying the first words she had ever been allowed to speak.

Finally.

I don’t remember shifting. Cassian says nobody’s first shift looks like mine; they take twenty agonizing minutes and end in tears. Mine took four seconds and ended with my father on his knees in the aisle, weeping into his hands, whispering “Isabella-Selene-look at her, love, look at her.””

I remember the treeline coming alive. I remember Rafe going past me like a black freight train and Kade’s shot cracking off the ridge. I remember Soren Draven trying to run and finding out what happens when four hundred wolves are done waiting.

My father got to him first.

I didn’t watch. I was already at the altar.

Milo was so small on that stone floor. His lips were gray.

–

I shifted back – naked, shaking, human and Cassian threw a coat over me and dropped beside him with his hands already moving.

“Collarbone, maybe a rib, shock, hypothermia-“His hands stopped. “Ember. His pulse.”

“What.”

“It’s strong.” Cassian looked up, baffled. “It’s – that’s not a silver-sickness pulse, that’s-”

Milo opened his eyes.

They were gold.

“Hi, Em,” he croaked. “You’re glowing.”

“You’re shifting,” Cassian said, stunned. “Kid – you’re seven you’re pre-shift by four years-”

–

“S’not sickness,” Milo mumbled, eyes sliding shut. “Never was. He said. Said I was ‘contaminated. Made me take the medicine so I wouldn’t wake up either.”

The whole clearing went silent.

I looked down at my brother.

Eleven years of silver in my back. Six years of “treatment” in his veins.

Two children in one house, both being held under water by the same hand.

“Cassian,” I said, and my voice didn’t sound like mine anymore. “What medicine has Milo been taking twice a day since he was four?”

Cassian pulled the bottle out of my bag with hands that were not steady, and read the label, and read it again, and then he closed his eyes.

“It’s a suppressant,” he said. “It’s the same compound. It’s a lower dose of what’s in your scars.”

I sat down on the floor of a ruined chapel and laughed until I cried, and my father came and picked me up off that floor like I weighed nothing, and my brothers closed in around us in a ring with their backs turned outward, and that’s how the Draven family got its daughter back.

The flight home, my father sat between us.

Milo slept against his left side with a splinted collarbone and my dolphin plush jammed under his chin. I sat on his right, wrapped in Rafe’s coat, watching my father look down at a seven-year-old boy who was not

his blood, who had called him tate, who had insulted him in a police station, who had bought me seven

days with his own body.

“He knew,” my father said quietly. “In that station. He knew what was coming for him on Thursday and he

sent you away anyway.”

“Yes.”

My father’s hand came up and rested on Milo’s head, very gently, over the fuzz of new hair.

“Principessa,” he said. “How do you feel about a brother?”

“I already have six,” I said.

He laughed wet and wrecked and real.

“Seven,” he corrected. “Say it. Say seven.”

“Seven,” I said.

Milo, without opening his eyes, said, “Told you.”