Page 46 of Sold to Three Alpha Kings

“Get over here!” he growls, already reaching for something at his belt with his free hand.

“Let go of me!” I struggle with his strength.

“Feisty!” He laughs. “Bet you’d fetch a fine price, this far from home.”

A hand reaches for my face.

I brace for it, every part of me flinching backward with nowhere left to go—

And then, I hear it, the agonizing scream of a man in a tremendous amount of pain. Before the scream was a familiar sound of a blade slashing through flesh.

When I look down, the hand is lying on the grass, and when I look up, the now one-armed man is screaming on the ground.

It happens too fast for me to fully understand. Then I see Sinth standing over the wailing man with a blood-dripping sword in his grip. His amber eyes are ice cold in a way I’ve never seen before.

I don’t move. I can’t. My whole body has locked into place, staring at the severed hand on the ground like my mind refuses to connect it to anything real.

The air around Sinth is thick with pheromones, heavier than anything I’ve felt from him before. It’s like a wave of pure, controlled fury that makes even the remaining swindlers stumble back a step.

Then Wayne and Chris dash out of nowhere, moving through the space like beasts unleashed. They rip these men apart with their claws and canines—a grotesque sight that makes my stomach turn.

All three Kings are in motion, dismembering my attackers, limb from limb.

The air is thick with the smell of blood and the wet, ugly sounds of a massacre I don’t want to watch too closely. Within a handful of seconds, the men who grabbed me are on the ground. In pieces.

Sinth turns to me, and whatever violence just lived in his face softens instantly the moment his eyes find mine.

“You’re safe,” he says, low, urgent. “You’re safe now.”

I’m shaking too hard to answer.

He crosses the distance and lifts me into his arms without asking, and I don’t fight it; I don’t have the strength left to fight it. I press my face into his shoulder as he carries me away from the scene and the blood and the dismembered bodies still lying on the ground.

Wayne and Chris flank us on either side, both of them tense, both of them scanning the woods like they expect another threat to emerge from the shadows at any moment.

Nobody speaks. There’s nothing to say yet that could fill the silence properly.

By the time we reach the carriage waiting across the woods, something has shifted in my chest, some fragile wall I’ve spent weeks holding in place finally beginning to crack.

They came for me. All three of them, together, moving like a single unstoppable force the second they realized I was in danger. Nobody in my entire life has ever come for me like that. Nobody has ever looked at me and decided, without hesitation, that I was worth protecting.

Sinth settles me onto the carriage seat, but his hands don’t leave me, one still cradling the side of my face like he’s checking I’m real.

Wayne climbs in across from us, his usual humor entirely gone, replaced by something tight and protective I’ve never seen on him before.

Chris lingers at the door a moment longer than the others, his ice-pale eyes fixed on me with an intensity that used to frighten me and now, somehow, does something else entirely.

Heat rises under my skin, sudden and overwhelming, nothing like the drug-induced burn from that first terrible night. This is different. This comes from somewhere inside me, some instinct finally waking all the way up, triggered by the sight of them tearing a street apart because someone dared to reach for me.

My breath goes ragged. My skin feels too tight, too hot, my whole body turning toward the three of them like it’s been waiting for exactly this moment to stop pretending it didn’t want to.

Sinth’s eyes darken the second he catches the change in my scent. Wayne goes utterly still across from me, his jaw tightening. And Chris, already seated across from me, breathes in sharply, something raw and undone flickering behind his usual iron control.

“Charlize.” Sinth’s voice comes out rough, barely more than a whisper, my name sounding like something sacred in his mouth for the first time since I gave it to them. “Are you—”

I don’t let him finish before claiming his lips in a heated kiss. He kisses me back, tongue in my throat. I lean in, my breasts on his chest, hands finding his erection.

Breaking the kiss, I breathe, “I want you,” then turn to Chris and Wayne. “I want all of you. Right here. Right now.”