Page 9 of Her Fated Alpha Prince
They didn’t speak as they walked. The hallways twisted through the palace like veins, alive with light and whispers. Every stone in the floor looked hand-laid, smooth and precise. Vines crawled up the walls in patterns too elegant to be natural, as if the building itself was some kind of creature pretending to sleep.
Ariana tried not to gawk. Everything was beautiful. Strange. Unreal.
Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was always watching.
Kael stopped outside a curved wooden door in a quiet corridor lined with carved columns. “This is yours,” he said.
The suite was larger than her apartment back home. A massive bed stood in the center beneath a draped canopy of soft white fabric. A sunken tub glowed in one corner, steam already curling into the air. A wall of open archways looked out over a garden bursting with deep green leaves and blood-red flowers.
It was breathtaking.
It was also a cage.
Kael stayed at the threshold, his hands behind his back like he didn’t trust himself to enter.
“You’ll have anything you need,” he said. “Food. Clothes. Protection.”
“I didn’t ask for protection.”
“No,” he agreed. “But you need it.”
She crossed the room slowly, her fingers grazing the cool marble edge of the bath. “Why me?” she asked without turning. “Why lie about who I am? Why bring me into all of this?”
Behind her, he exhaled hard. “Because if they knew what you really were—if they knew you were human—you’d already be dead.”
Her body went cold.
She turned to him. “But… you’re not human either, are you?”
His eyes flickered, like fire behind smoked glass. “No.”
She stepped closer, drawn in again without meaning to. “Then what are you?”
Kael didn’t answer. Not directly.
Instead, he moved one step into the room, his voice low and dangerous. “You don’t need to be afraid of me, Ariana. But youdoneed to understand something.”
Her breath caught.
“I broke sacred law the moment I pulled you from the sea.”
Their eyes locked.
“I don’t regret it,” he said.
Then he turned and walked away, vanishing into the shadows of the corridor.
Ariana stood there, frozen in the echo of his words.
She didn’t know what to feel. Gratitude? Anger? Fear?
All she knew was that the air still held the heat of him.
And that when he’d looked at her just now—like he’d do it all over again—her heart hadn’t raced out of panic.
It had raced because part of her… wanted him to.
CHAPTER 4
