Page 63 of Sold to Three Alpha Kings

“Who else? Me, of course.” He winks at me.

I roll my eyes, but I’m smiling by the time I look away, and he knows it.

Wayne doesn’t ground me the way Sinth does. He unsettles me instead, in a way I’ve started to crave more than I expect to.

Every bicker ends in something warmer than where it started. I don’t fully understand that yet. I don’t need to, to know I want more of it.

And then there’s Chris—the hardest and most complicated of them all.

He tries. I see the effort in nearly everything he does now. He’s actually softened since Snowpeak. The same Alpha who once ordered my execution now threatens to kill anyone who dares speak to me out of tone. He’s not the same man who called me weak in that throne room.

But I still feel him fighting it. Some nights I catch him watching me with something raw in his eyes, something that looks almost like longing, and then he catches himself and the wall slides back into place before either of us can name what just happened.

I understand it, in a way. I do the same thing myself.

Because no matter how gentle he’s become, I can’t fully forget that first night. Blood on my cheek. His voice, flat and absolute, telling the room I wasn’t worth the trouble of claiming.

The scent-match pulls at me anyway, some deep, wordless part of me straining toward all three of them whether I want it to or not. But memory holds me back just as hard as instinct pulls me forward, and some nights I don’t know which one is winning.

I don’t tell any of them that. I don’t know how to, without reopening something none of us are ready to look at directly.

***

I’m sitting alone in the garden thinking about my new reality and all that has happened to me since my father and his wife traded me for my brother’s intended.

They don’t know where I am, whether I’m dead or alive. They sold me to those traders like a cheap piece of furniture. I think about them for a moment, finally realizing that selling me off was the best thing they’ve ever done for me.

If they hadn’t made that decision, I never would’ve met my fated mates. Sure, I might’ve escaped and left the Star island for good. But that would’ve been a different life altogether.

Also, what are the chances of actually getting off this island without being kidnapped by swindlers? I experienced it firsthand—what I most probably would’ve gone through if I had run away from home when I planned to.

And in that reality, there would’ve been no one to save me. I’d have been trafficked and sold off as a sex worker somewhere.

I recall the incident that night in the woods near the docks. My Kings had shown up in the nick of time and saved my life. They couldn’t save my money pouch, unfortunately. I lost it that night. All my life’s savings, gone. Just like that.

I’m still deep in thought when Chris materializes out of nowhere.

He sits beside me without asking. That’s new too—the old Chris would have stood, formal, waiting for permission even to occupy the same bench.

“You look troubled,” he says. “Is everything alright?”

I glance at him, tucking my hair to the back of my ear. “Yeah. Yeah, everything’s fine.”

“It doesn’t look like it,” he says, waiting patiently for a response.

I almost tell him everything. The fear. The memory that won’t fade no matter how hard he tries to earn something better. But that feels too big for a garden bench on a quiet afternoon, so I give him the smaller truth instead.

“The night I ran away I…I lost my money pouch,” I say. “Every coin I’d saved. It’s stupid to be upset about it now, considering everything else that’s happened, I know. But I keep thinking about it. That money was the only thing that was ever fully mine.”

He goes quiet for a moment.

“That’s not stupid.”

“It feels stupid. I have a palace room bigger than my father’s entire house. Why does losing fifteen silver still bother me?”

“Because it was yours.” His voice stays even, careful. “Because you earned it, hid it, protected it for years, and it goes missing in a struggle that almost cost you your life. That’s not a small thing, Charlize. Don’t let anyone convince you it is.”

I don’t answer right away. Something in his tone catches me off guard—no lecture, no correction, just understanding, plain and direct.