Marked By The Alpha I Was Sold To

Chapter Three

Mei Lin POV

The Zhao house looked exactly the same as the day I left it. Bukit Timah had not changed in two years, same white walls climbing up behind the same iron gate, same guards standing at attention who nearly dropped their spears when they saw me walking up the drive alone, unannounced, in a dress that did not belong to this house anymore.

My mother came running before I had even made it through the front door, her slippers slapping hard against the stone path. She hit me with enough force to knock the air clean out of my chest, both arms wrapped tight around my neck like she was afraid I might disappear again if she let go too soon.

"Mei Lin. You're really here. You're really here."

"Mom." My voice came out smaller than I meant it to.

My younger sister Hui Ling slammed into the both of us a second later, taller than I remembered her, her hair longer, crying and laughing at the exact same time the way she always did when she felt too much at once. For one brief second, standing there between the two of them with my face pressed into my mother's shoulder, it almost felt like nothing bad had happened to me at all.

Then a voice cut through the moment from the end of the hall, calm and controlled in a way that made the whole house seem to go quiet around it.

"Mei Lin."

My father stood there in his formal coat, hands folded neatly behind his back, watching the three of us the way he watched everything, like a man calculating the value of what stood in front of him. Alpha Wei Cheng Zhao, ruler of Bukit Timah Pack, and the man I had made a desperate bet with two years ago that I had just, officially, lost.

"I see you kept your word," he said, as though I had simply returned from a long holiday and not walked out of two years of my life in pieces.

"The two years are up. I am here."

His eyes dropped, briefly, to the raised scar still burning faintly beneath my collarbone. "So the mate bond failed."

"Yes."

"A shame." He did not sound like he believed it was a shame at all. "We will discuss the arrangements in the morning. Eight o'clock, the dining hall. Do not be late."

He turned and walked back down the hall without another word, as though the conversation had already ended the moment he decided it should.

That night, long after the house had gone quiet, my old friend Aisha slipped into my room past midnight the way she used to when we were teenagers hiding from our parents after curfew.

"How are you holding up?" she asked, settling onto the edge of my old bed like no time had passed at all.

"How do you think?"

She reached over and squeezed my hand. "Tomorrow your father talks arrangements. Do you know anything at all about the Alpha you are supposed to marry?"

"Just that his name is Jing Feng Ong. My father said he was reasonable. Fair, even."

Something shifted across Aisha's face, quick and gone before I could properly name it, like a shadow passing over water.

"What?" I asked, sitting up straighter.

"Nothing." She shook her head too fast. "Just, be ready for anything tomorrow, okay? Promise me that much." She squeezed my hand once more and slipped back out before I could push her any further, and long after she had gone, I lay awake staring at the ceiling, unable to shake the feeling that everyone in this house already knew something I did not.

I did not sleep at all that night.

The next morning, my father delivered the news over breakfast, calm as anything, stirring sugar into his tea like he was discussing nothing more serious than the weather outside.

"There is a complication," he said. "Jing Feng Ong died two years ago."

My fork froze halfway to my mouth. "He is dead? Then the contract is void, surely"

"The contract was made with House Ong. Not with one single man." My father did not even glance up from his cup. "When the head of a house dies, the obligation transfers directly to his heir."

At the far end of the hall, heavy doors creaked open. Guards filed in wearing black armor, heavier than anything our own pack wore, colors stitched into their shoulders that I did not recognize at all.

"Father, who are they?" Hui Ling whispered beside me, her hand finding mine beneath the table and gripping it hard.

My father did not answer her. His eyes stayed locked on me instead.

"Jing Feng's older brother is Alpha now," he said. "You will be marrying Kai Wen Ong instead."

The doors swung wider, and a man had to duck his head low just to fit through the frame. Old scars ran across his throat and the backs of his hands, wolf furs draped heavy over shoulders wide enough to block out the light spilling in behind him.

His eyes found mine across the room and did not move away.

"So you are the daughter Wei Cheng Zhao has been hiding from me," he said, his voice low and rough, cutting straight through the heavy silence that had settled over the entire room.

Hiding. The word landed somewhere deep in my chest and stayed there, burning, refusing to fade even as I tried to make sense of it. Beside me, Hui Ling had gone pale, her fingers digging into my hand hard enough to hurt. Across the table, my mother's teacup rattled softly against its saucer, though her hands did not seem to be shaking at all. Only my father remained perfectly still, watching the stranger in the doorway with an expression I could not read, as though this moment had been years in the making and he had simply been waiting, all this time, for it to finally arrive.