Page 69 of Promised to the Alpha Prince

“Spoilers,” I said.

She shrugged. She gave me the vodka.

I downed it. It tasted good, but it was still strong, and I grimaced a little.

“Well,” she said, taking her shot, “these things, they end badly. In books, anyway.”

“This is not a book,” I said. I held out my shot glass. “Another one.”

“You’re here because you want advice,” she said. “I’m an older, wiser, more experienced woman, your only girl friend in this whole drafty mess of a castle, and I’m also an alpha. So, I’m going to tell you exactly what to do.”

“Okay,” I said, waiting.

She took my glass and hers and filled them both back up. “You forget about him.”

“What?” I said.

She handed me the shot. “You’d already written him off. He’s been out of your life since you were seventeen. You figured you’d never see him again. Dare I say, you’ve been very happy with Dmitri, against all odds, because I’ve never seen him so downright cheery. Why screw all that up? You’ve barely even scratched the surface of things with Johannes, and I know you two have a connection.”

“And Nikolai,” I said. “Yeah.”

“You can’t run off with Corentin, obviously.”

“Obviously,” I said.

“You’d be leaving all this behind.”

“I would,” I said. “And I don’t want to do that.”

“So… shut the door on Corentin.”

“But how did he become an alpha?” I said. “How is that even possible? What did he do? A person can’t do that.”

“That is very strange,” Ilse said. “It begs the question, right? If you can turn yourself into an alpha, can you turn yourself into a beta?”

I blinked at the possibilities of that thought.

Ilse downed her shot.

“You wouldn’t,” I said. “Would you? Be a beta?”

“Be normal?” she said faintly. “No, who’d want that?”

“You’re bonded to Cole,” I said. “You wouldn’t give that up.” I still hadn’t really ever talked to Cole, apart from a few conversations here and there at various functions, but Dmitri and I never stayed at functions for very long, because we were too wrapped up in each other.

“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t.” There was something wistful in her tone, though.

I waited. When she didn’t say anything, I couldn’t help but prompt her. “But?”

“But there’s something we lose, isn’t there, the way we have to live?”

“Being normal, you mean?”

“I mean, the having-one-other-person-to yourself part,” she said. She heaved out a very noisy sigh and went over to the drink cart to pour herself another shot. “If you tell anyone I said this, I will deny it. This is the vodka talking, you understand? Sometimes, when you’re drunk, you say things, but they don’t mean anything.”

“Can I have more vodka?”

“No, you’ve had enough. You’re getting married tomorrow.” She upended the shot into her mouth, swallowed, made a face and then set it down with a flourish. “Cole was always the King’s, always. I came into that situation later, and there’s always priority to, you know, them. They are a twosome, Cole and the King, and when I’m with Cole, it’s never really like it’s just me and Cole, because I’m always the third wheel or the fourth wheel or even the eighth wheel if Cole is having a particularly terrible heat. Although, if I haven’t thanked you for triggering Cole’s last heat, remind me to do that, because…” She shivered. “That was fan-fucking-tastic.”

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