Chapter 17 - Charlize
As time goes by, my relationship with the three Kings deepens, and with that come a lot of complications. They’re all different in their own unique ways, but the one thing they have in common is their affection for me.
They collectively refused to let me take the mate bite, saying it’s too risky and they can’t afford to lose me. My whole life, nobody has ever stood up for me or protected me the way these Kings do.
By their actions, and with their words, they have made it perfectly clear that I’m off limits. No one is allowed to mock me for being shiftless, and it’s almost like that word is banned around the palace.
Even the elders know better than to cross my Kings. These actions of theirs have planted seeds of affection within me, and those seeds are starting to germinate.
I fall for Sinth first. I don’t decide to. It just happens, slow and quiet, the way most true things do.
He’s consistent. That’s what gets me, more than anything else. Wayne runs hot and cold depending on his mood. Chris still fights himself over every soft thing he lets slip. But Sinth never wavers. He shows up the same way every time—patient, steady, asking nothing of me I’m not ready to give.
I catch myself watching for him some mornings. Waiting for his knock instead of the other two. When he sits with me by the fire and asks about my day—really asks, as if the answer matters to him more than anything else on his schedule, something in me settles that hasn’t settled in years.
“You’re doing that thing again,” he says one evening, glancing up from the book he’s reading aloud to me.
“What thing?” I curl my lips into a smile.
“Staring at me like I’m a puzzle you’re trying to solve.”
“Maybe you are.” I mean it as teasing. It comes out more honest than I intended.
He smiles at that—doesn’t push further. That’s Sinth all over—he lets things sit exactly where they land instead of demanding more than I’ve offered.
I think I love him. I don’t say it out loud yet. But I think it, quietly, more nights than I’d admit to anyone.
Things are different with Wayne. He’s louder. Messier. We fight more than any of the other pairings—over small things, mostly, his teasing pushed too far, my temper flaring faster than it should.
Just last week, he ate the last of the honeyed bread I’d been saving, and I didn’t speak to him for an entire day.
But something about the fighting works for us. We circle back around to laughing about it every time, and the laughing feels earned.
“Cutie, don’t tell me you’re still mad about the bread,” he says, two days after the fact, grinning at me across the breakfast table like he hasn’t been apologizing on and off since it happened.
I fake a frown. “I was saving that bread for later that night, and you ate it without my permission.”
“I’m sorry, okay?” He spreads out his arms. “But how was I supposed to know you were saving it for later?”
“Uh, maybe because it was covered in a plate on the table beside my nest…in my room?” I cast a mock glare at him.
“It’s just a damn bread, what’s the big deal?” Wayne pushes back.
I place both hands on the table. “The big deal is that I spent the whole day thinking about that bread only to find out that you’ve eaten it. Do you know how heartbreaking that is?”
Sinth chuckles under his breath, and Chris has an actual grin on his face. It’s small. But it’s there.
“Fine. I’ll have the kitchens make you an entire loaf. Just for you. Guarded, if necessary.”
“Guarded from who?” Sinth asks him.
“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.
He stands, offers his hand. “Come with me.”
I hesitate but eventually take his hand.
He leads me to his study, a room I’ve never been inside before. Dark wood, tall windows, and a heavy desk stacked with papers I don’t try to read.
He opens a drawer and pulls out a pouch, considerably heavier than the one I lost, and presses it into my hands. “Here.”
“Huh?” My eyes widen in shock.
“It’s yours. Take it.”
My heart stops, breath hitches. “Chris, I can’t—”
“You can.” He closes my fingers around it. “Spend it however you want. On anything you want. You don’t need permission, and you don’t need to justify it to me or anyone else.”
I stare down at the pouch, throat tight. “This is too much.”
“It’s not nearly enough, considering what you lost wasn’t really about the coin.
” He holds my gaze, steady. “You lost the one thing that made you feel like you had some control over your own life. Now, I can’t undo everything that’s happened to you.
But I can make sure you never have to feel that particular kind of powerlessness again. ”
I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t trust my voice not to break if I try.
“Thank you.” My voice is barely above a whisper.
He leans in and presses a kiss on my forehead.
He must have told Wayne and Sinth about my situation because before the end of the day, they both show up in my room at different times. They don’t come empty-handed, and before the sun sets, I already have so much money that I’m not sure how to spend all of it.
That evening, the three of them sit with me in the nest, no urgency to any of it, just quiet company and the fire crackling low.
Wayne tells some ridiculous story about a fishing trip gone wrong that has me laughing so hard I clutch my belly.
Sinth leans against my shoulder, content just to listen. Chris sits close, closer than he would have dared a month ago, his hand finding mine at some point without either of us commenting on it.
I look between the three of them—Wayne’s grin, Sinth’s quiet steadiness, Chris’s hand still holding mine like he’s afraid to let go now that he’s finally allowed himself to reach for it.
Something in my chest, so long braced for disappointment, finally lets itself rest.
I don’t know how to untangle everything I feel for each of them yet. I don’t know if I ever fully will.
But sitting here, warm and surrounded and, for the first time in longer than I can remember, genuinely wanted, I let myself stop trying to solve it tonight.