MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR
Wren killed her parents. That's what everyone believes, including her.
For six years, she's paid for it, stripped of her wolf, sold into servitude by her own brother, treated like she doesn't have a name. She stopped fighting a long time ago. Surviving was the only thing left.
Then Alpha Ronan arrives to finalize a contract between packs, and everything about her makes him stop. Her scent isn't wrong. It's impossible. Something in her blood calls to something in his, and he can't walk away, not even when her brother swears she's a monster, not even when Wren herself begs him not to look too closely.
Ronan wasn't planning on taking a broken girl out of her brother's house. But the moment he hears the first lie come out of Garrick's mouth, he knows he's not leaving without her.
What he doesn't know is that Wren's past isn't finished with her. Her old pack is hiding something. Her brother is hiding something bigger. And the truth about the night her parents died might be the one thing strong enough to burn down everything Ronan has built to protect her.
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Chapter: Chapter 178Ronan POVHe did not stand up. He is seventy-nine, and he stopped standing up in rooms about nine years ago, and he stayed in his chair by the window with his stick across his knees and spoke to the floorboards.“My grandfather kept that corn store,” Trewin said. “My father kept it. I’ve kept it fifty-one years, and there’s a barn behind it that held forty-one women in the March of the year before last, and I was in my bed ninety feet off.”Nobody in that room breathed.“I declined in the September gone. Somebody will have it written down, then write Ranneck declines. I did that because I’d worked out that anything I put my hand to from then on, I’d be admitting I could have put it somewhere sooner.” He got his head up. “That’s vanity. I’m too old for it, and I’ve had a year of it,t and it’s no good to anybody, least of all the forty-one.”He reached inside his coat and took out a folded paper and held it up without looking at it, and one of the Ollan men came and took it to the box.
Last Updated: 2026-09-29
Chapter: Chapter 177Wren POVThe long room over the corn store at Ollan holds sixty if nobody sits, and on the eleventh of September there were a hundred and forty in it and men three deep on the stairs, and the corn dust came down through the light from the end window the whole four hours.Thirty-five houses with a seat. Thirty-one of them with nine steps under a corn store. Hedrek at the top table with the box. Kellow on the left with his fourteen. And on the right, standing because there was no chair left, a woman of forty-one in a borrowed grey shawl with Tamsin of Carrow on one side of her and Nell Trevaskis on the other in a chair that two men had carried up two flights without being asked.Hedrek called it at ten past eleven and did the thing nobody expected, which was to talk about himself first.“Before there’s any standing, the room hears this,” he said. “Nineteen years ago I countersigned the Ranneck quarter-day list for the March quarter without turning the page over. There were five women on
Last Updated: 2026-09-29
Chapter: Chapter 176Ronan POVShe came into my yard three weeks before the vote, on foot, in the dark, with nine miles of Nance road on her boots and no lamp, and every wolf in the place got out of her way without being told.I have seen that happen twice.“Where’s the girl?” Rhoswen said. “Not Wren. The one that holds it.”Ade came out with the lamp in her nightgown and a coat over it.“Fourth name on that paper,” Rhoswen said. “Read it off the lodged original in your own hand, out loud, so I know Wren didn’t soften it for me in a lane.”Ade went in and came out with the brown book and read it.“Hocken of Pellynt.”Rhoswen stood in the middle of my yard in September and undid two buttons of her coat and took out nine pages of a four-year-old’s letters, soft as cloth, and held them up in the lamplight like a warrant.“Then put me down for the eleventh,” she said. “And somebody’s going to have to teach me to write it so it doesn’t shake, because he’ll hold that sheet up to the window and look for it, and
Last Updated: 2026-09-29
Chapter: Chapter 175Wren POVI went to Nance on the nineteenth of August, and I walked the nine miles because I had decided somewhere around the fourth mile that arriving on a horse would make it a deputation and arriving on my feet would make it a visit, and I have since been told by Enid that this is the sort of thing I decide instead of eating.Third house down from the chapel. One room and a lean-to, a hen in the lean-to, and split wood stacked higher than the door.She opened before I knocked.“You’ve walked it,” she said.“I have.”“Then it’s bad.” Rhoswen looked past me down the empty lane. “Come in or don’t, but shut it either way.”Inside there was a table, a chair, a bed, and my copybook, propped open against a jug with the spoon across it, and beside it a slate with Rhoswen of Thornhollow written on it eleven times, and the last four were a woman’s hand and not a child’s.“I’ll say what I came for first and drink your tea after,” I said, “because if I do it the other way I’ll have had your tea
Last Updated: 2026-09-29
Chapter: Chapter 174Ronan POVHe came on his own, in July, sixty miles up the river road on a hired horse, and got down in my yard in the middle where everybody could see him and stood waiting to be spoken to.I want that written because I had spent four months calling him a coward.Sabe came out first and looked at him the way she looks at weather. Eleven wolves in that yard, and she stood in front of the lot of them with her arms folded.“He’s not armed,” she said. “Papers in the left side.”“I’ve always got papers in the left side,” Kellow said. “It’s where the pocket is.”I took him into the kitchen and sat him in the chair that faces the shelf, which was a small and cheap thing to do, and he knew it, and he looked at the grey book for a good long while and let me have it.“Say your business.”“I want the book in the office. Two keys: one to the county clerk and one to a warden the thirty-one houses choose, and neither opens it alone. Read out loud at the four quarter-days in the yard at Ollan where
Last Updated: 2026-09-29
Chapter: Chapter 173Wren POVKellow’s paper came to Ravencross on the second of June, and it was the worst thing I have read in a year, and I have read manifests.It was one sheet. It did not accuse anybody. It did not use the word cellar, or margin, or woman, and it did not mention the wall at Thornhollow that his own fifty coins had helped uncover, which is what makes him dangerous and what makes him honest, and those have turned out to be the same thing in his case.It said: that the county register of Ravencross, kept lawfully in the county office for eighty-six years, is held presently by a private person in a private house, and that the undersigned wish it returned to the office and kept as it has always been kept.Fourteen names under it.I read them at the kitchen table with Ade opposite me, and I got to the fourth and stopped, and Ade said, “I know. I did the same.”Hocken of Pellynt.The man who stood up in the long room on the ninth of May, third on his feet after Nance and Carrow Bridge, and
Last Updated: 2026-09-29
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