Mated to the Alpha: Sold to the King novel Chapter 226

Chapter 226: 0226

Kaelen POV

It took every ounce of strength I had left just to force those words out of my mouth.

I, the great Alpha King, a man feared across continents and a warrior who had been built for war, had once been nothing more than a powerless child who was subjected to something far worse than death.

Tears burned hot against my cheeks, and I hated every fucking one of them. I didn’t even understand why I was crying.

Maybe it was because it had been ten long, agonizing years since I had allowed myself to look directly at those memories buried in the darkest corners of my mind.

Or maybe it was because of how terrifyingly vulnerable it felt to finally lay the most shattered part of my past bare before someone else, trusting another person with the ugliest truth about me after the devastating betrayal that had followed the last time I had made the mistake of doing so.

My pulse hammered against my ears as I finally forced myself to look at her.

I watched her face carefully, waiting for it, that inevitable shift in her eyes.

The coldness.

The disgust.

The moment she would finally see me differently.

But then her breath caught sharply. Her green-flecked eyes widened, and the color slowly drained from her face as the full weight of what I had just confessed finally sank in.

My mind immediately flashed back to Seraphina.

To the day I had made the mistake of trusting her with the same dark secret.

She hadn’t reacted like Lorelei was reacting now. Seraphina had simply stared at me with that emotionless expression, her eyes vacant, almost bored as I told her about the trauma I had spent years trying to bury.

And later, she had taken that same secret and used it against me, turning the most painful part of my past into nothing more than another weapon to bind me to her.

But Lorelei...

Lorelei didn’t look bored.

She didn’t look disgusted.

She looked completely and utterly horrified, but not because of me.

She was horrified by what had been done to me.

Before I could even figure out what to make of that, she reached for my hands again. Her small, warm fingers carefully wrapped around my bruised knuckles, and she gave them a gentle squeeze.

"I’m so, so sorry that happened to you," she whispered, her voice cracking around my name, the sound so fragile that something inside my chest tightened painfully.

While I sat there frozen, watching as fresh tears spilled over her lashes and rolled down her pale cheeks.

She was crying.

For me.

She wasn’t pulling away. She wasn’t looking at me like I was damaged goods or some monster she needed to be afraid of. She wasn’t looking at me with disgust.

Instead, she swallowed hard through her own tears, her thumb moving slowly over the back of my hand in soft, soothing circles as she held my gaze.

"How old were you?" she asked softly.

She’s listening.

She knows I’m talking about her. She’s going to appear out of nowhere and drag me right back into that room.

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