The Alpha King Marked Me. I Still Haven't Told Him I'm A Girl novel Chapter 48

Chapter 48: Forty Eight

I skipped breakfast with the King.

Sweat slides down my chin as I spin mid-air and snap my foot into the punching bag. It groans, exhaling dust. Ignoring it, I hammer my fists with renewed vengeance, until I can no longer feel the voices in my head. Until I can no longer see the blood. Until I can finally breathe without aching to ruin and break something.

Ilya. My fist slams into leather.

Oh, I remembered it. A life that didn’t belong to me but felt like mine. It makes me furious, that someone could take my body for a ride and use me as a conduit for her endless hunger for her shit-headed Erasthai.

I’d come to and found myself beneath him, legs spread as wide as they could go, chest arched with my breasts in his face, and if I hadn’t been in pants, she might have stuck his dick right through me. Without a single care that she was violating me.

I couldn’t even look him in the eye. I hated them both. I hated myself. I can’t even look in a mirror without wondering who’s staring back. Am I me? Or is someone else pulling the reins?

My anger burns farther than Ilya or Lucien. It goes far along towards Thane. He had always known what I was. He never said a single thing to me. He never thought to explain that I had more battles to fight than holding a wooden sword and playing guard for Silvermoor. He had acted like he was on my side when he never was.

The thing inside me is like a ticking time bomb and he never told me. Everything I’d ever known would be lost, and I would seize to be Valka if I ever let my walls down. I hadn’t even known I had mental shields in place.

I remembered Ilya’s life. But I didn’t remember mine. Two centuries of my own life completely gone and all I had of it was a dream and a name. Malachy.

The name of a man I had apparently loved. A man who had killed me. I must really make bad choices when it comes to men.

Which brings the more embarrassing questions. When did I have my first kiss? I know it’s pretty stupid, but how about we switch places and you find out that everything you knew about yourself didn’t exist? You start to trivialise it before it swallows you whole.

Have I lain with a man before? What did it feel like? Why did I think I’d grown up in House Ironfang? What were those memories? Did Ilya alter them somehow? Why did I call Rhea mother, even if I knew she wasn’t? Why did I believe I was nineteen years old? How could I have forgotten my entire life and rewritten my own memories?

Did Thane do it to me? Did Ilya? Or did I do that to myself?

A frustrated snarl tears from me as I punch harder, faster, going through steps in a blur. My whole life, I’d pondered on the word purpose. I believed I’d found something close to it when I broke out of the norm and rode out, taking my father’s place.

I thought I’d made that decision myself. I thought it had been mine. My life. My choice.

But every single decision I made brought me back here. To Ebonheart. To this castle. To this Selection. And nothing enrages me more than the fact that none of this was my choice, really.

I was always going to end up here. Because Ilya’s home was Lucien. I was always going to find my way back to him, because Ilya had been trying to return home for centuries.

This wasn’t my life!

Did I stay away from the pretty clothes, hairs and vain things the women at Silvermoor favoured because I wanted to, or was it the design that had been set out for me? Did I find it all dull because I always knew I wasn’t built for small men and small minds? That I was made for the most powerful being that walked the earth? That a destiny to walk by his side had been imprinted on me without anyone some much as thinking, "Oh, darling Valka, do you want to be stuck wanting a thousand year old prick for the rest of your life that doesn’t even belong to you by the way?"

This was Thandric’s manipulation at play. Guardian? The Goddess sent him to guide me?! Either he’s a liar, or he arranged everything for his own ends. Gods help me if I lay my hands on that fucker. I will kill a god.

And how was I to explain? That the only reason I felt hot around him was because I was... technically his dead Erasthai?

I can almost imagine how that conversation would go. Lucien is so damned testy on the subject, he’d probably make do on his promise and finally boil me alive.

Lyra.

A hot, electric sting blooms across my knuckles but my mind doesn’t register it.

A hand lands on my shoulder and my body acts faster than my mind can. It moves, on pure instinct, swivelling eerily fast. Pent up anger and panic bleed together and for a moment, all I feel is... hate. And that unholy fire that isn’t mine. The kind of fire that sweeps everything along it’s path and ruins in.

I don’t realize what I have done, until the man hits the ground with a pained grunt and a loud ’pop’ that snaps me out of it. And I realize who I have pinned.

Leander lies at my feet, his arm bent unnaturally, shoulder wrenched from its socket.

I stumble back, horrified. "Leander! Oh gods, I--" I reach forward to help him up, but he flinches. Pain flashes across his features as he rises and manages a bow, keeping a respectable distance from me.

"Forgive me, Lady Nythorn," he says. "I have overstepped, putting a hand on what belongs to the King."

The apology dies on my tongue.

Only then do I feel the silence. The weight of stares pressing from every side. Courtiers and guards, the men training in the yard, all of them watching me. Their gazes are sharp, wary, the memory of the Selection fresh in their gaze. The memory of killing a woman with barely five spoken words, and the memory of the King pulling my plastered body off the rocks, holding me to his chest and snarling for a physician. And if the men were as much of gossips as the men back in Silvermoor were, then what happened between Lucien and I must have made the rounds around the castle.

Before now, I hadn’t considered how it must have looked.

Like I was favoured by the King. Like I was screwing him. Like I belonged to him.

When I don’t speak, stewing in more and more frustration, Leander’s gaze snaps to the leather bag behind me before meeting mine again. "The King has summoned you to his chambers."

My fists clench. Couldn’t I have an entire day of successfully avoiding him? Perhaps, this is where he punishes me for slapping him and spitting in his face by skipping breakfast and dinner yesterday with the rest of the ’surviving’ heiresses of the Royal Houses.

But last I checked, he didn’t notice. Not with all the talk of women coming in and out of his chambers in troves, attesting to his wondrous methods of pleasure in bed.

Why did I even care?

I turn back to the bag. "Later."

Gasps echo in the air at my supposed insolence. Currently, I don’t even have coins to buy myself enough fucks to give.

"I must insist," Leander presses. "It is urgent."

I raise my fist, cocking it in a pre-emptive strike. "Clearly not enough. He knows where I am if he wishes to find me."

My next blow explodes into the leather, leaving a huge, steaming hole in the bag. I click my tongue in annoyance. The guard by the door, a timid looking wolf who couldn’t have been older than seventeen rushes over to replace it. With the sixteenth bag.

If I couldn’t punch who I really wanted to, I could at least, take it out on the bags.

Nearly five minutes after Leander leaves to convey my message to Lucien, I feel a vicious tug in my chest, along with a voice dark as night, scraping along my mental walls.

*"You never learn, do you?"*

I’m beginning to think that is Lucien’s favourite line. Trying to shove him out of my head only results in his claws digging deeper, the tug in my chest, my very blood growing more painful by the second.

*"One minute, Valka. I am not in the mood for your antics."*

I try ignoring him. I really do, but as the time frame elapses, my chest constricts tighter and tighter, until I can no longer breathe. Until my fingers rise to my neck, clawing at it to get air in. My feet move of their own volition, the whip of his command taking control of me, and I head for the dark wing of the castle, oblivious to the people around me.

There is no flourish. No theatrics. The words land like a verdict and I have barely processed them before pain explodes in my right cheek, snapping my head left. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

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