The Alpha's Slave-Born Daughter Made Kings Kneel novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: One King Alone

Linnea's POV

The collar clicked shut, and the world went flat.

The Voice, which had been mine for a week, went dead as a stone.

I put my hand to the iron.

It was cold, and it did not burn, because I was not a wolf the way the old King thought.

"There," said the King of Fenmark, pleased. "Now you are what you should have been at five. Quiet."

His men stood along the hall, spearmen in mail, with the iron ring at their backs.

My mother sat in her cage, with her thin fingers wrapped around the bars.

"Bring her to the throne," said the old King.

Two men took my arms.

I let them.

I walked down the long flagged floor, past the rows of silent wolves, toward the great black ring in the floor.

"You burned the Moon Court," I said.

"I did not burn it. I rode in the second column." He smiled at me. "Your grandfather would not give me his crown for a fair price, so I took it. Kray was merely the match."

"You wanted my mother in a cage for twenty-six years."

"I wanted the crown. She was the key." He looked past me at the cage. "She's older now. But a Queen's a Queen, even at forty-seven. And her daughter will do for a chair-warmer."

"For a what?"

"My heir will rule the Moon through you."

I had stopped walking.

I stood at the edge of the iron ring, and I looked at my mother.

She looked back at me.

Then she hummed.

It was one low note, from the cage, so thin I almost did not hear it.

I knew it.

I had heard it every night through twenty years of dark, with her thumbs pressed on my cuffs.

My mother hummed again, the second note, and the old King's smile faltered.

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