Claimed By The King(s) Of Kings

Aina

Aina stares at herself in the mirror, and it is not her own face looking back at her. It is not even a girl. A boy with choppy blond hair and vivid blue eyes stares right back. She has cut her long locks and dyed them to match her step brother’s, though her attempt looks nothing like his pristine trim. The bowl cut she gave herself makes her look like a total idiot, but it will work well enough to fool the people of Moonside.

Her natural purple eyes itch beneath the contact lenses, blurring her vision even more than usual. She forces herself to endure the stinging irritation because those eyes are a dead giveaway. There is no world where the son of Alpha Whitelock suffers from a weak wolf, and she cannot afford to let anyone suspect the truth.

"I lowkey look hot," Aina mumbles to herself, reaching for her glasses on the bathroom counter.

She slides them onto her face, letting it settle the blurriness just enough to make her surroundings clear. The train is a full week away from the capital, which means she is still a week away from her real future. She has spent seven long days putting this new identity together piece by piece. Every single night, she sits in the shadows and watches her real face flash across every news channel. The whole world knows her name and her face by now, searching for a runaway girl who no longer exists.

Grumbling to herself of her cursed fate, Aina made her way out the bathroom. Aina stepped out of the bathroom, her brand-new, thoroughly ruined bangs bouncing against her forehead with every step. She looked ridiculous—a walking, talking bowl-cut disaster—but at least she didn’t look like Aina Whitelock, the defective alpha’s daughter with the weak wolf and the world’s most useless pedigree.

Her bedroom in the VIP train cabin looked like a library had exploded all over the crisp white duvet. Stacks of thick, terrifyingly heavy textbooks were piled high, their titles practically screaming threatening slogans at her. On the wall-mounted screen, a video was paused on a frame of a middle-aged man with an aggressive mustache pointing at a whiteboard full of numbers.

Math. Or as Aina preferred to call it: The Devil’s Subject.

Instead of rotting in her cabin for the two-week journey doing absolutely nothing, she’d decided to do the unthinkable: study. For the first time in her sixteen years of existence, Aina was attempting academic ambition. Her brother Travis was a certified prodigy who could solve calculus in his sleep, while she had spent most of her life mastering the art of cleaning an entire pack house. But if she was going to live as a boy in the capital and fake her way into a new life, she needed a head start. She couldn’t be a complete idiot and have a weak wolf.

Choose a struggle, Aina.

Sighing through her nose, she dragged her body toward the bed. The mattress was ridiculously soft, melting beneath her like a cloud of pure bliss, whispering sweet promises of an eight-hour nap. Her muscles practically begged her to just collapse and let the world burn.

No. Her future was calling, and it was significantly louder than the mattress.

Aina snatched the remote, unpaused the video, and plopped down cross-legged, pulling a pristine notebook and a ballpoint pen onto her lap.

"Now, if we integrate the exponent across the x-axis, the polynomial simplifies quite elegantly," the guy on the screen droned, writing a series of completely fake-looking symbols across the board with aggressive speed.

"Riiight. Elegantly," Aina muttered, her tone dripping with sarcasm. She squeezed her eyes shut for a second to fight the agonizing itch of the blue contacts, then forced them open. She pulled the heavy textbook closer, her pen scratching against the paper as she aggressively copied down every letter, symbol, and line, mimicking his movements like a desperate cult follower.

"Now," the mustache man said, smiling with an intolerable amount of enthusiasm, "pause the video and try this next problem on your own to see how you do!"

The screen froze on a monstrous equation that looked less like math and more like an ancient curse meant to summon a demon.

Aina narrowed her eyes. "Alright, mustache guy. Let’s see it."

She paused the video, set her jaw, and dove in. For ten excruciating minutes, her pen flew across the paper. She multiplied, she divided, she carried the two, she canceled out variables with absolute, unshakeable confidence. She was a genius. A prodigy! Her brother had nothing on her.

Satisfied, she jabbed the play button and the mustache man instantly began scribbling the solution, the more he wrote the more Aina’s confident smirk slowly withered. Her eyes darted from the screen to her notebook, then back to the screen.

Wait. Where did the six come from? What happened to the negative sign? Why is there a fraction now?!

Her final answer was 142. The correct answer was -7

She hadn’t just gotten it wrong; she had offended the entire mathematical community. "I am so over this," Aina groaned aloud. With a theatrical sigh of utter defeat, she threw herself backward onto the bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. "Screw math. Math is a scam invented by people who hate fun. I’m just going to learn Geography."~

She reached out blindly for the remote to change the video, but before her fingers could touch the plastic, her entire cabin was suddenly drenched in a mesmerizing, deep azure light. The screen cut off as a soft ding-dong echoed from the overhead speakers.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your conductor speaking," a crisp voice echoed through the room. "We are currently passing through the deep-trench tunnel of the Crystal Moon Ocean. If you direct your attention to your cabin glass, you will see our native marine life in full display."

Aina forgot all about the cursed numbers. She slid off the bed, her bare feet hitting the chill of the polished wooden floor, and walked straight toward the massive, wall-sized viewing glass of her cabin.

Her breath hitched.

The large void of the ocean was alive. Swirling schools of bioluminescent fish darted past the glass, glowing in brilliant shades of neon blue, violet, and silver. Massive, translucent rays glided gracefully overhead like living shadows, their faint glow illuminating the deep ocean floor far below. The water rippled with light, turning the entire room into an underwater sanctuary.

It was breathtaking. It was vast, wild, and utterly untamed.

Standing there in the cool blue light, Aina felt a lump form in her throat. All of it, the pain of cutting her hair, the itchy contacts, the ruined bangs, the terrifying fear of being caught by her father’s guards, even the soul-crushing math, it was all worth it.

She looked at the fish swimming wild and unbothered in the vast, endless sea. They didn’t have parents that hated them and only had them because the alcohol was too strong. They didn’t have news channels broadcasting their faces. They were just free.

One day, she thought, leaning her forehead against the cool glass, I’m going to be just like you guys.

She lost track of time standing there. She watched the glowing schools split and merge, watched strange, shimmering creatures float by like ghosts. But as the hours bled together, the bioluminescence gradually faded. The glowing sea life drifted deeper into the abyss, leaving behind only an endless, pitch-black void.

Now, instead of majestic fish, the window reflected only the dark, terrifying ocean depths—and a faint reflection of her own terrible haircut. The blackness outside began to look less like wonder and more like a monster waiting to swallow the train whole.

Aina shivered. "Okay, nope. That got creepy real fast."

She aggressively yanked the velvet curtains shut, blocking out the scary abyss. "I’ll look back in the morning when the light fish come back."

Stretching her arms high above her head with a long yawn, she turned back toward her bed. The pile of heavy textbooks sat there, silently judging her.

"Nope," she said instantly to the books. "We are continuing that tomorrow. Or never. Probably tomorrow."

She carefully picked up the heavy texts one by one and set them gently on the floor. She made sure not to drop them or bend the pages; she was eighty percent sure the train company would charge her a ridiculous fee for damaging their VIP cabin study materials, and she was currently living on a stolen budget.

With the books cleared, a sudden, heavy wave of boredom settled over her. She’d been locked in this cabin for an entire week, living off room service and existential dread. Her feet were practically itching to move.

Maybe I should step outside, she thought, rubbing her chin thoughtfully. Just a tiny walk. A stress test to see if anyone can actually tell I’m a girl.

Decision made, Aina adjusted her heavy glass frames, squared her shoulders, put on her best ’brooding teenage boy’ scowl, and pulled open her heavy cabin door.

She stepped into a long, quiet corridor lined with a plush, crimson carpet that muffled her footsteps. Because this was the ultra-exclusive VIP section, the hallway was completely empty. It was just a row of heavy, dark-wood private doors on one side, and on the other, a massive wall of glass showing the ocean outside. Which was the first thing that caught Aina’s eye as she stepped out. The very pitch black night sea she was trying to avoid was staring back at her.

Aina froze in the middle of the carpet. The scowl melted right off her face. "Yeah, absolutely not," she whispered to herself. There was no way she was going out; only the goddess knew what could lie in that pitch black ocean.

Aborting the mission instantly, she spun on her heel, scrambled back into her cabin, and slammed the heavy wooden door shut. She locked it twice for good measure.

Shaking off the creeps, she dove straight onto the soft bed, pulling the thick duvet all the way up to her chin. She grabbed the remote and quickly navigated the screen to a bright, ridiculously colorful animated movie, cranking the volume up just high enough to drown out the low, echoing hum of the ocean outside. The ocean at night was not as nice as the ocean in the day.

She curled into a ball, staring at the bright colors dancing across the screen. The ocean outside was dark, her hair was a tragedy, and math was still her mortal enemy, but as she slowly closed her heavy eyes, Aina smiled, even though many things weren’t going her way. She was still away from her treacherous family and things were still looking up.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!