Sold as the Alpha King's Breeder novel Chapter 385

Chapter 43 The Dungeon

*Theo*

“Where shall we take him, my lady?” one of the guards asked Sophia as I stood in front of them, wearing the torn remains of my guard pants.

Sophia puzzled over me, stroking her chin with one finger as she thought about what to do with me. I knew that Ciana was panicking back behind me in the garden area still, near where all of the shredded rose bushes lay, but there were guards between us.

“Take him down to the basement,” Sophia said. “I saw some kind of cages down there. Put him in one of those.”

I snickered, knowing she couldn’t legally hold me. After all, ‘she wasn’t yet married to the king, so she wasn’t the Luna Queen. She had absolutely no authority whatsoever to take me prisoner or hold me in a dungeon.

But I went along with her, all of it part of the plan.

“You can’t do that!” Ciana shouted.

I turned and looked at her, willing her to be quiet. She had to know by now that I was up to something, didn’t she? The panicked look on her face said otherwise.

Was she really worried about me? That silly woman…

It was nice to think that she might care a little bit about what happened to me, but in reality, she was probably just concerned that we’d never get back to our own reality if I was locked up somewhere and not able to help with our plan.

In the basement, I immediately noticed that it was not a dungeon. There were bars here and there that formed different areas, but I saw telltale signs that this room held lots of secrets. I had to wonder who had lived here before Sophia and what kinds of activities they might have used the area for.

It wasn’t to hold people as prisoners, not for long anyway. Of that, I was fairly certain.

“This’ll teach you!” one of the guards said as he shoved me behind a flimsy barrier of bars.

“Yeah, he’ll die down here! Starve to death!” another one laughed.

They all traipsed up the stairs, and I shook my head. Getting out of there would take me less than five minutes.

But that wasn’t what I had in mind.

I could tell by the way the stones were constructed both in the walls and the floors that this place wasn’t as solid as it was meant to appear to be. There was more to it than that, and I intended to discover exactly what it was, even if no one else understood my purpose. It might seem to be a distraction from the true matter at hand, but I needed to sort it all out because I thought it just might make our task easier.

For a couple of hours, I took my time feeling along the walls and floor, looking at the different way that the rocks fit together, searching for some sort of weakness, a breach in the strong hold. A few areas interested me more than others. I thought I saw a switch mechanism in the floor, but I was afraid to push it because I didn’t know exactly what it did. It would probably be better to do that under cover of darkness.

“That was rather impulsive,” Ciana said as she rushed in, seemingly appearing on the other side of the bars out of nowhere. “You had to go and destroy all of those rose bushes and get yourself thrown in the dungeon!”

The worried look on her face actually made me feel good. What the heck was wrong with me?

Trying not to smile, I addressed her. “It’s not as bad as you think. Didn’t you notice how unique this place is?”

I knew her better than she thought I did. I saw the way that she was always looking at every place she was at, studying it, taking it all in.

“So?” she asked me. “You’re trapped now.”

I shook my head at her. “I don’t think I am. You see-”

Before I could finish, I heard the familiar voice of my brother and saw him traipsing over to the other side of the bars to stand beside her. “What in the world happened?” Warren asked, still thinking he was the king. “I’ve heard Sophia was giving you a hard time. Are you hurt?”

He was speaking to Ciana, toying with her, acting like there was a possibility he still had feelings for her, and it made me want to lash out irrationally at him. How dare he choose to be with another woman but think that he still had possession of her?

Momentarily, I forgot that it would actually work in our favor if Warren was still interested in Ciana.

Instead, I found myself shouting at him. “Well, if it isn’t the high and mighty king,” I said, my eyes narrowing as I felt a darkness settle over my countenance. “Who do you think you are? If you’ve made the decision to abandon her, why are you even here now? Or… deep down, you don’t even know which of these women you want, do you?”

“How dare you address me in such a manner?” he asked me, coming a bit closer. He and Ciana were right on the other side of the bars now. “You’re just a guard, and I’m the king.”

Snarling at him, I approached the button in the floor I’d found earlier, a loose stone cast among the others. I wanted to get out of there so I could teach him a lesson. No longer caring that it would be better to do this behind his back, I stepped on it, hoping that the flimsy bars would fall away.

I saw Ciana’s eyes widen first as her hands went shooting up in the air. Warren’s did, too, but I wasn’t as concerned about him.