All Chapters of The Prince's Mistake, The Alpha King's Heir: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Effie's Pov I woke up feeling warm and comfy. That was the first thing I noticed, before I'd even opened my eyes, before I remembered I had any reason to be confused about where I was. Warm, and sinking into something so soft it barely felt real, sheets that smelled of cedar and clean linen and, underneath both of those, something darker and achingly familiar that made my whole body go still before my mind had caught up to why. The room swam into focus slowly as I blinked up at a ceiling I didn't recognize, high, nothing like the room I'd been given on my first night at Thornwick. Everything in it was built on a scale that made me feel smaller than I already did, a room large enough to stand in, a wardrobe that could have swallowed my old room whole, heavy curtains pulled back from windows that looked out over grounds I didn't recognize from this angle. This wasn't a guest room. This was someone's room. I shot upright so fast the blood rushed straight out of my head, heat craw

Effie's Pov "Alpha Knox, I mean it, put me down—"He set me down exactly once, on the closed lid of the toilet seat, which was not even remotely what I'd meant by the request."There," he said, entirely unbothered, already crossing to the enormous sunken tub against the far wall and turning the taps until steam began curling up off the water. He reached for something on the shelf above it, and a moment later the air filled with the soft, clean scent of something floral as foam bloomed across the surface. "Better?""N... not even a little." I pushed myself up off the seat, testing my weight gingerly on my bandaged ankle. "I can run my own bath. I've been doing it myself since I was ten.""I don't doubt it." He didn't so much as glance over his shoulder. "However, you're not doing it today."I opened my mouth to argue further and found myself, a moment later, with his hands at the hem of my borrowed nightgown instead, and every word I'd been about to say simply forgot how to exist."W

Effie's Pov I woke up squeezed so tightly between two very large, very warm men that for a moment I genuinely couldn't tell whether I wanted it to end.Alpha Tobias had an arm slung heavy across my waist, his face half-buried in my hair meanwhile Alpha Knox had somehow claimed my hand again in his sleep, fingers loosely laced through mine against his chest, his breathing slow and even. It would have been almost sweet, waking up tangled in all that warmth, if my bladder hadn't chosen that exact moment to remind me, rather urgently, that I had to make a beeline towards the bathroom.I tried, very carefully, to wriggle free.It did not go well. Every inch I managed to gain on one side, Alpha Tobias simply tightened his arm without ever fully waking, pulling me back against him like my escape was a problem to be solved in his sleep. I tried the other direction instead, pressing gently against Alpha Knox's chest, and got exactly as far before his hand closed loosely around my wrist."Whe

Effie Pov Ava held a covered dish in her hand, something that smelled, even through the cloth draped over it, like a honeyed apple tart still warm from an oven. For one disorienting second, standing there with the door handle still cold under my palm, I thought I might actually be imagining her entirely, conjured up out of some old, half-forgotten nightmare about Hollowmoon and everyone in it who'd ever looked at me like I was something to be managed rather than spoken to. Then her smile, the polite, practiced one she must have worn walking up to the door, faltered and died right in front of me, and I knew with sudden, sinking certainty that I wasn't imagining anything at all. "You." The word came out of her flat and disbelieving, the dish nearly slipping from her grip before she caught it again. "It's actually you." Her eyes swept over me, head to toe and back again, taking in my feet, my hastily laced dress, the loose, unbound state of my hair, with the exact same cruelty I r

Ava Freemon PovI didn't stop shaking until I was halfway back across the Thornwick grounds, toward the quiet wing where Jasper kept his household and where I'd made myself comfortably, permanently at home these past months.I tossed the damn tart aside.Fury did that to me. It always had, ever since I was a girl learning to master it instead of letting it master me, and by the time the familiar doors finally came into view, I'd worked myself into such a state that I very nearly snapped at the warrior posted outside them simply for having the audacity to greet me.An apology. They'd made me apologize.To her of all people!Two kings, two alpha kings, men whose attention half the unmated omegas in this kingdom would have sold a limb for, had looked at me, Ava Freemon, a woman who'd spent months proving herself worthy of a place in this very palace, and made me bow my head to that fat omega. A woman with a backside the size of a small cart and a face that still, infuriatingly, managed