Marked By The Alpha I Was Sold To

Chapter Five

Mei Lin POV

The lights came back on a second later, but Hui Ling's face had already gone white as paper, her eyes wide and fixed on the door.

"It's nothing," she said quickly, too quickly. "Old wiring. This house has never worked right. I'll tell you everything tomorrow, I promise you that."

She slipped out before I could stop her, before I could ask a single question, and I sat alone in my room for a long time afterward, staring at the closed door. I did not sleep at all that night. Two days remained before Kai Wen returned to take me away from everything I had ever known, and now my own sister was hiding something from me as well, something that had made her go pale enough to frighten me.

Aisha came the next evening, slipping through my window instead of the door this time, a plan already forming behind her eyes before she had even said a word of greeting.

"There's a way out," she whispered, pulling me close. "My cousin drives the delivery van for the wet market on the east side. He can get you past the checkpoint tonight if we move carefully and quietly."

"They'll catch you if I go."

"Not if they're too busy chasing me instead." She grabbed my old jacket off the back of the chair and pulled it over her own shoulders. "I'll wear this and walk through the back garden where the guards can see me clearly. They'll think it's you trying to run again. While they're busy dealing with me, you slip out through the side gate unnoticed."

"Aisha, if they catch you wearing my things"

"They want you, Mei Lin. Not me." She squeezed both of my hands hard enough to hurt, her eyes serious in a way I had rarely seen from her before. "Midnight. Side gate. Please, do not be even a minute late."

At midnight exactly, I watched her disappear down the darkened hallway in my jacket, her shoulders squared like she was walking into battle for me, and five minutes later I slipped through the narrow kitchen passage myself, my heart slamming hard against my ribs the entire way.

I made it to the side gate without a single guard noticing. A plain delivery van sat waiting exactly where Aisha had promised it would be, engine already running low and quiet.

"In the back," the driver muttered without turning around. "Stay low beneath the crates. Do not make a single sound no matter what you hear outside."

I climbed in and the van rolled forward slowly into the dark, gravel crunching softly beneath its tires. Every checkpoint we passed felt like the one that would finally give me away, my breath held tight in my chest each time, but the guards waved the van through both times without so much as a second glance inside.

Hours later, once the road beneath us had turned rough and unfamiliar, the driver finally spoke again. "We're clear now."

I pushed the crates aside and breathed in the cold night air for the first time in what felt like forever, my whole body shaking, hardly able to believe I had actually done it. I had actually gotten out.

The old hunting cabin Aisha had told me about sat deep within the forest, half-buried beneath years of overgrown brush, dark and silent when I finally found it after walking nearly two more hours on foot. I lit a small fire in the old stone hearth, wrapped myself tightly in a thin blanket I found folded in a corner, and let myself believe, just for one single night, that I had truly escaped everything waiting for me back home.

I woke sometime later to the smell of smoke that was not coming from my own fire.

I sat up fast, my heart hammering hard against my ribs, and found him sitting calmly across the small room in the only other chair available, one boot resting casually on his knee, watching me with an expression that told me he had been sitting there for hours already, waiting patiently for me to wake up on my own.

"Running," Kai Wen said quietly, "was a mistake you should not have made."

I scrambled backward until my spine hit the wall behind me. "How did you even find me out here?"

He rose slowly to his feet, and the small cabin seemed to shrink instantly around his sheer size, the ceiling suddenly feeling far too low above his head, the walls pressing in closer than they had ever felt before.

"I never stop hunting what belongs to me," he said, taking one slow step closer. "You should have already learned that about me by now, little wolf."

My back pressed harder into the wall. He kept coming closer until there was nowhere left at all for me to go, until the old scar across my collarbone, the one Jun Wei had left behind when our bond tore apart, began to burn suddenly as though something beneath my skin had caught fire.

"What is happening to me?" I gasped, pressing my trembling hand hard over the scar.

Kai Wen went completely still above me. His grey eyes dropped slowly to my collarbone, then lifted just as slowly back up to my face, something dark and unreadable moving behind them.

"That should not be possible," he said, his voice low and rough with something close to disbelief, something almost like fear.

"What should not be possible? Tell me."

He reached out toward me, his fingers stopping just above the burning scar without quite touching it, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his skin like a fire of its own.

"You are my mate," he said finally. "Which means whatever your father truly did to my brother all those years ago, you and I are bound together now, whether either of us ever wanted this or not." His hand did not move away from my collarbone. Neither did his eyes.