Chapter 12 - Charlize
They keep coming back.
Not just one of them, testing the waters the way Wayne first did with his easy grin and his refusal to leave when I told him to. All three, in different ways, at different hours, until I’ve started marking the days by which King finds his way to my door and what he brings with him.
Sinth with his quiet questions and his patience, Wayne with his noise and his terrible jokes that somehow still make me laugh. Even Chris, in his own strange, distant way, is starting to gradually loosen up a little.
I know their voices now before they even speak. I know the particular rhythm of Wayne’s footsteps, too fast, too careless. I know the careful, measured pace Sinth uses even walking down an empty hall. I know the silence Chris carries into a room, heavier than either of the others’ noise.
I hate how much I’ve come to know them. I also hate how much I’ve started to want it.
The nest has become something I retreat to without meaning to, curling into it the second I’m alone, breathing in a scent that’s become as familiar as my own skin.
For a girl who has never really belonged anywhere, this is starting to feel dangerously close to home.
That terrifies me more than anything else has since I arrived here.
Because I know how this goes—I’ve lived it once already, in a throne room with blood still drying on my cheek. They looked at me and decided, out loud, in front of witnesses, that I wasn’t worth the trouble of wanting.
Nothing about who I am has changed since that night—I’m still shiftless in every way that matters. I’m still an unstable, half-formed thing the healer isn’t certain will ever fully wake. The only difference is that right now, in this fragile, borrowed peace, they’ve decided to forget that.
They won’t forget forever. Something will remind them—some council meeting, some elder muttering about weak bloodlines, some quiet moment where Chris looks at me and remembers exactly what he said the first time.
And when that happens, what’ll happen to me?
I’ll be the one left standing in the wreckage of it, the same way I always have been. The thought terrifies me so much my chest hurts.
I can’t let myself build a life around three men who might wake up tomorrow and decide, all over again, that I’m not worth keeping.
I make my decision on a gray, quiet afternoon, while all three of them are occupied with council matters I wasn’t invited to and wasn’t expected to care about.
I still have my pouch. Fifteen silver, forty copper, sewn into the hem of the same dress I was brought here in. I’d managed to convince Briana and Martha—the elderly servant—not to touch that particular dress.
They let me wash it myself and let me add it to my collection of fancy, royal clothes. Amidst my new outfits, though, my old dress looks more like a rag than something someone wears. But that rag is where my money is hidden.
It isn’t much. It might be enough to buy passage on a smaller vessel, something that doesn’t ask too many questions about a woman traveling alone.
I tell myself this is sensible. Practical.
The same plan I had before any of this happened to me.
I tell myself none of that changes the math—that whatever these Alpha Kings feel toward me now is built on the assumption that I’d stop being the weak wolfless character they met at first. On the fact that I’m a new thing to them…
something curious, that they are unused to.
In my head, newness fades, and if I don’t get better, they’ll get bored. When it happens, I’ll be exactly what I was in Ashwick. Extra. Unwanted. An outcast.
It’ll hurt more than before now that I’m already starting to like these Kings. I’m starting to enjoy their company—together and individually.
I’d kissed all three of them on different occasions, and deep down, my body wants more. My body craves more. And no day goes by that I don’t imagine being intimate with all three.
It’s not something I’m used to. It’s not something I’ve ever even dreamed of—being dominated by three powerful Alpha Kings. However, the thought of it always stirs something primal within me.
I want them. All three at once. It’s my darkest desire.
But every time that thought pops up in my head, I remind myself that nothing is etched in stone. These Kings might reject me again later on.
What if the healer was wrong about my wolf? What if it’s actually dead and no amount of resting can revive it? What if all of this was some kind of a mistake and I’m not what the Kings think I am?
If I let myself be with them, running away would be more complicated.
I know I shouldn’t entertain such negative thoughts. But I can’t help it.
“Nothing good can ever come out of you. You’re a cursed child!” That’s what my own father once told me. “You ruin everything you touch!”
I manage to convince myself that there’s no true happiness for me here. So, I make up my mind to escape.
***
I already know all the exits at the palace—courtesy of Brianna. She’d taken me on a tour around the building more than a few times when I was bored.
Tonight, dressed in a black cloak with my money pouch in my pocket, I sneak out of my room. By now, I’m familiar with the guards’ routines and the time intervals between their shifts.
I’ve already studied their movements and discovered the perfect window for my escape. And when the opportunity presents itself, I don’t hesitate to take it.
I slip out through an old passage that leads out of the palace. And from there, I make my way toward the lower town where the docks are supposed to be.
It’s dark, and the full moon is at its peak in the night sky, its ethereal glow silvering everything it touches. Under the cold and distant stars, I run through the woods, breathless and thoughtless, until I reach my destination.
The docks stretch out ahead of me in the dark. Rope and shadow, mostly. Lanterns hang along the wooden posts, their light thin and swaying, barely enough to cut through the fog rolling off the water.
Ships creak against their moorings. Hulls knock softly. Sails sit furled tight for the night.
The air smells like salt and tar, something colder underneath. The promise of a crossing I haven’t managed to buy yet.
Voices carry from further down the docks, low and indistinct. I pull my cloak tighter and wish the dark hid me as well as it hides everything else down here.
I head toward the docks, my heart racing in my chest.
“This is it,” I tell myself. “You’re finally leaving this cursed place.”
I spot movement in the trees, and I stop in my tracks, breath hitched in my throat. “Who’s there?” I ask, scanning the rustling bushes.
Maybe I should just make a run for it instead of waiting to see whatever had moved in those trees.
Good idea.
I hear a wolf-whistle as I turn around, and my heart stops when I see three buff men standing in front of me.
Where’d they come from?
“What’s a pretty damsel doing out here all by herself?” one asks me, his voice deep and menacing, eyes filled with something that resembles evil intent.
“I don’t want any trouble,” I manage to say. “I’m just heading to the docks.”
“At this time of night?” the second man asks.
“Maybe she’s running away from home,” says the third man.
“Or maybe… she’s running to meet her lover who’s on the other side of the island.” The first man has his eyes fixed on me.
The others laugh.
“Delinquent. I like it.” The second man’s gaze sweeps over my body.
I’m not comfortable with this setting—a defenseless non-shifter cornered by three men twice bigger than her at night, in the woods. Everything about this situation screams danger.
“Please, let me through.” My voice is steady, masking the fear underneath. “I really need to board a ship across.”
“Why the hurry?” The first man reaches out to hold my hand. “We can take you there.”
I squirm out of his hold, irritated by his touch. “I think I can manage.”
“I insist.” His eyes move over me, slow, assessing.
My heart is hammering in my chest as I watch his expression turn colder than before.
“You know, girls like you who attempt to run away in the cover of night are always worth a lot more coin than whatever’s in that little pouch of yours.” His eyes drop to my swollen pocket.
I understand what he means half a second too late. These people are traffickers.
I try to run. A hand closes around my arm before I make it two steps, wrenching me back hard enough that I cry out.
The world narrows into panic as I struggle with three men, none of whom are willing to let me walk away. I kick one in the balls, and while he groans and stumbles back, I jam the back of my head in the face of the man holding me from behind.
“Fuckin’ bitch!” He lets go of me. “She broke my fuckin’ nose!”
Before I can bolt, though, the other man grabs me by the hair, pulling wickedly against my scalp. I scream in pain.
“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.”
I’m no longer in control. My desires and hunger for them have taken over completely.