Ch. paid to leave pregnant with the vampire king heirs 3 paid to leave pregnant with the vampire king heirs 3

Chapter 3 

Chapter 3 

Marlow told me later exactly how it happened. 

+45 Coins 

Augustus Vale climbed the stairs himself, a man who hadn’t climbed his own stairs since the Civil War, and shoved open the door to my suite. 

Immaculate. Impersonal. A hotel room waiting for its next guest. 

He walked into the closet. Half a million dollars of Vale rubies sat untouched in velvet. Not one piece 

taken. 

On the vanity, the black card pinned down a single sheet of paper. 

The PIN is your birthday. I never used it. 

He stood there for a long time. 

For a year, he had watched me like a thief. He’d had my accounts monitored. My calls logged. My blood tested monthly, like livestock. He had been certain I’d married his son for money. 

And when I left, I took only what the contract said I was owed. 

“What is this supposed to prove?” he snapped, throwing the card down. 

That was when Celeste Moreau glided in. 

White silk. Red lips. Concern painted on like lipstick. 

“Uncle Augustus, don’t upset yourself. Humans are so emotional.” 

I should explain Celeste. 

She and Dorian were turned in the same century, raised in neighboring Courts. Every vampire on the East Coast assumed she’d be his Queen one day, including Celeste. When Dorian bonded himself to a nobody human from a bankrupt family, she smiled for the cameras and then stopped feeding for a month out of pure rage. 

She was also the one who did it. 

I learned this weeks later. While Dorian was in Geneva closing a European acquisition, his legal filings 

Chapter 3 

+45 Coins 

were being handled by assistants. Celeste had one of them in her pocket. She slipped a pre-drafted Rite of Severance into a stack of urgent documents, had it stamped with Dorian’s blood seal, and triggered the 

payout. 

Her plan wasn’t stupid. 

She believed Dorian was bored of me. She believed I would cling. Scream. Refuse to sign. Drag the Court through a public scandal that would cost him his Council seat. And then she would be there, the loyal old friend with a shoulder and a solution. 

She got exactly one thing wrong. 

I never wanted to be his bride in the first place. 

“I heard he paid her out,” Celeste said lightly, accepting a crystal glass of something dark red. “The severance clause?” 

“Fifty million,” Marlow said. “She countersigned within the hour.” 

The glass stopped halfway to her lips. 

Within the hour. 

No screaming. No begging. No scene, 

For the first time, something cold crawled up the back of Celeste’s neck. 

It had been too clean. 

Meanwhile, I was sitting on my terrace in the afternoon sun eating strawberries, and I felt the babies move for the first time. Three tiny taps, like someone knocking politely on a door. 

I laughed out loud at the sky. 

I was nobody’s bride. Nobody’s blood supply. Nobody’s empty cup. 

I was just Sloane. 

At 11:40 that night, a black jet touched down at a private airfield outside the Vale estate. 

Dorian Vale came down the steps loosening his tie, ten nights of negotiations behind him, a signed 

Chapter 3 

acquisition in his bag. 

His assistant handed him his phone. “Your Highness. Miss Moreau called fourteen times.” 

He nodded and opened his inbox out of habit. 

The subject line was three words long. 

BLOOD BOND SEVERED. 

He stopped walking in the middle of the runway. 

Legal confirmation. Wire receipt. My signature, scanned, crisp, immediate. 

It wasn’t his order. 

+45 Coins 

In a year, he had never once considered ending it. 

The phone crumpled in his hand like foil. 

And then, Marlow says, the Prince of the Eastern Court did something no one in that household had seen in four hundred years. 

He went to his knees on the tarmac, pressed a hand to his own chest, and said one word into the dark. 

“Sloane.” 

Three thousand miles away, at 3:04 in the morning, I woke up with blood running down my neck. 

And his voice inside my head. 

Where are you?