All Chapters of The Alpha Kings Sacrificial Mate: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

191 Chapters

Chapter 20: Now, Lilith. Open your eyes now

The sob that came out of her then was so large it bent her double. She hadn't known how badly she needed to hear those words until they landed in her chest and broke something open....something that had been sealed shut since the night she'd read that flyer, since the night she'd made the decision, since the moment she'd told herself: he would understand, he would understand, he would understand, please let him understand.He understood.He had always understood."But Dad....""No." He kept patting her head. Slow. Steady. "A good mother would not want her child's suffering as the price of her life. And I know Elena. Your mother would move heaven and earth to undo this if she knew. But she doesn't know, does she? She was unconscious. She couldn't stop you." He tilted his head slightly. "And you were alone."The words landed like stones in still water, sending ripples through everything.You were alone.Three words. That was all. But they carried the full weight of everything she hadn't

Chapter 21: Fuck You Nicholas

She cleared her throat.It felt like swallowing glass."Can I go?" she asked.The words came out barely above a whisper, scraped thin by everything her throat had been through. She kept her eyes on the bed in front of her. Kept her face down....small and still, the way prey learns to be still."Can I go, please."Not a question, really. More like the sound of someone who has already accepted that the answer might be no, but is asking anyway because asking is the only thing left.Agnes opened her mouth.The door opened before she could speak.****He had told himself he wasn't going to come in.He had told himself that he would stand in the corridor outside and wait for Agnes to confirm the girl was awake and then have James the driver pull the car around.That had been the plan.Sebastian had, naturally, demolished it."I just want to see if she's awake," his brother had said, already moving down the corridor with that particular brand of casualness that Lucian had long ago identified

Chapter 22: We Are So Fucked

The beta delivered the news to Nicholas in three lines.The girl from the Rite had not been escorted off the property.She was in Lucian's guest quarters.He was moving before the man finished talking. Nicholas stood up and made his way to his brother's quarters, the look on his face was that someone who was about to have a very pointed conversation with a younger brother. Lucian had been given a direct order. Lucian had not followed it. And Nicholas was going to make sure he understood exactly why that was a problem.He was halfway down the corridor when he heard it through the door.I am not his daughter.The words stopped him.Not the content....he'd already processed that, already filed it under complicated and left it there. It was the tone. The way it didn't sound like a statement. It sounded like a prayer. Repeated, desperate, aimed inward rather than out.He stood with his hand on the door for one full second.Then he pushed it open.His eyes found her immediately. He couldn't

Chapter 23: Get Her Cleaned Up

Across the room Lucian's eyes cut to his. Said nothing. Looked at Nicholas.Nicholas drew a long slow breath through his nose. Released it. His eyes moved to Agnes."Agnes."She straightened immediately. "Yes, Alpha Nicholas.""Double her reward." His voice was even and controlled. "Have her prepared and taken to the hospital.""Yes, Alpha."Nicholas looked at his brothers. Both of them watching him. Sebastian with that flat cold stare that said you better have something better than this. Lucian with something quieter, more complicated."What." Not really a question. "She is Uncle Marcus's daughter. I have spared her. I have doubled her reward." A pause. "She needs to leave. We still have a ritual to finish. We still have a mate to find."He looked at Lilith one more time.She hadn't moved from Sebastian's chest. Probably hadn't heard any of it. Or didn't care.He turned and walked out. The door clicked shut behind him.Sebastian sat with her for another moment. One last slow delibera

Chapter 24: Do You Know My Father?

"I need to get to the hospital."Agnes looked up from the window where she'd been standing, giving Lilith a moment of quiet. The girl had her head raised from her shoulder, eyes still swollen, voice still cracked....but there was something different in her face now. The crying had burned off and left something harder underneath. Something with direction."I need to see my mother. I need to make the payment today."She moved to get up.Her legs gave out completely.Agnes caught her before she hit the floor....both hands gripping her arms, steadying her, holding her up with the practiced ease of a woman who had learned long ago that sometimes holding people up was just part of the job."Easy." Agnes kept her voice level. "Easy, child. Your body is still very weak."Lilith grabbed the bedpost. Tried to find her feet. Her legs were shaking...not nerves, not emotion, just pure physical failure. Her body had nothing left to give.Agnes looked at her. At the bruises creeping out from under t

Chapter 25: Was it worth it?

Inside the bathroom, Lilith locked the door.Then she stood in front of the mirror and didn't move for a long moment.It was a beautiful bathroom. Of course it was...everything in this estate was beautiful, expensive, the kind of space that existed in a different universe than her apartment with its leaking tap and the crack in the ceiling she'd been meaning to report for eight months. Black marble countertops. Gold fixtures. A bath big enough to swim in.She wasn't looking at any of that.She was looking at herself.She reached for the hem of the borrowed shirt and pulled it over her head and stood there in the mirror's light and looked at what the night had left on her.Bruises on her hips. The perfect dark prints of hands, five fingers, decorated both sides of her tights. Her thighs....she didn't look at her thighs for long. Bite marks along her collarbone, her shoulder, the curve of her neck. The yellowing edge of where fingers had gripped her waist too hard, held her too still, k

Chapter 26: The new set of girls has arrived

Nicholas was standing at the window when the car pulled around.He hadn't meant to be. He'd come into his sitting room with the full intention of reviewing the files his beta had left on his desk....documents that actually mattered, that required his attention, that were relevant to the things currently at stake for this pack. He'd sat down. He'd opened the first file.And then he'd looked up.The car was pulling around to the front of the estate and the girl was coming down the steps, Agnes beside her, moving carefully. Even from here....two floors up, distance between them....he could see how she moved. The deliberate quality of it. Every step managed.She's in pain. The observation arrived without invitation. She's hiding it but she's in pain.He watched her stop at the bottom of the steps.Watched her look back at the estate.He couldn't see her face clearly from this distance. Just the line of her....slim, small, dark-haired, standing at the bottom of his front steps with a woode

Chapter 27: I Sold Myself Mama, But I Don't Regret It

The billing department was on the ground floor.Lilith had been here so many times in the last three months that she knew the route without thinking. Left at the main desk. Down the corridor past the chapel. Third door on the right. The woman behind the counter....Carol, always Carol....looked up when she heard footsteps and her expression did something complicated when she saw who it was."Ms. Thorne.""I'm here to settle my mother's balance," Lilith said. "In full."Carol blinked. "In....I'm sorry?""In full." Lilith set the wooden box on the counter and opened it.The silence that followed was very satisfying.Carol looked at the gold bars. Looked at Lilith. Looked back at the gold bars with the expression of someone whose brain was trying to catch up to what her eyes were telling her."I'll need to have these assessed," Carol said carefully."I know. I'll wait."It took forty minutes. Lilith sat in one of the plastic waiting chairs with her hands in her lap and her back straight a

Chapter 28: Her Traitorous Body Remembers

He put the money in his drawer. Wrote her a receipt. Slid it across the desk without comment."You're paid up through next month," he said."Thank you, Mr. Petrov."She left before he could say anything else.She got home at four in the afternoon.The apartment was exactly as she'd left it....minus the eviction notice, which she'd taken down from the door before going inside. She stood in the middle of the small space and looked at it. The crack in the ceiling. The leaky tap dripping its slow rhythm in the kitchen. The mattress on the floor because she'd sold the bed frame two months ago for grocery money.It wasn't much.But it was hers. And now it was staying hers.She sat down on the edge of the mattress and let herself be still for the first time in forty-eight hours.Her body immediately took the opportunity to remind her of everything it had been through. Her muscles ached with the deep, settled soreness of overuse. Her hips. Her thighs. The bruises she'd saw in the mirror that

Chapter 29: Burning

One week.It had been one week since she walked out of the Blackwood estate with ten gold bars and bruises that were only now starting to fade from purple to yellow.One week and Lilith still couldn't sleep through the night.Not once. Not a single night.It started on the third day. The first two nights after she got home she'd slept like the dead....pure exhaustion dragging her under the moment her head hit the pillow, no dreams, nothing. Just black, empty, merciful nothing.She should have known it was too good to last.Because on the third night they came back.All three of them.She woke up gasping, sheets twisted around her legs, her whole body drenched in sweat and something else entirely. Her heart was hammering. Her skin felt like it had been set on fire from the inside.And her fingers....She yanked her hand out from under the blanket and stared at it.When did I.....She hadn't even been awake. That was the part that horrified her. She'd done it in her sleep. Two fingers b

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