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 15 Ronan’s POVArticle nine gets stamped at eight in the morning by a clerk who can’t look at me while he does it.“You understand this is entered in the public record, Alpha.”“I do.”“And that a claim of this nature cannot be withdrawn by the claimant, only dissolved by the claimed party before a full council.”“I know what I’m signing.”Rhys, behind me, says nothing at all, which is the loudest he’s been in fifteen years.We cross the water at noon with eleven men, which is either an escort or an army depending entirely on how the day goes. The far bank is quiet. There’s a boat tied off badly, a house with no smoke, and a woman sitting on a stump in front of it with a pipe she isn’t smoking.“You’re the Alpha,” she says.“I am.”“You’re late.”“You’re the binder.”“I am.” She stands up. Maren, then, and she comes barely to my chest and looks at me the way a farrier looks at a horse. “You’ve a paper in your coat.”“I have.”“Article nine?”“Yes.”“Hm.” She spits into the grass. “Then
최신 업데이트: 2026-09-03
Chapter: Chapter 14Wren’s POVI make them argue about it in front of me, which is new.“Absolutely not,” Maren says.“She said run,” Isen says. “Nell surfaced for four seconds after eleven years and she used them on a warning, and you want to sit in this kitchen and wait for morning.”“I want the girl to have a day. One day, Isen. She learned her mother’s name this morning.”“She doesn’t get a day. Nobody’s ever given her one, and I’m not able to be the first.”“Then say the true reason.”“That is the true reason.”“Say the other one.”“Fine.” Isen slaps the table. “The other reason is that my wife spoke this morning and I would sell this entire valley for another four seconds of it. There. Is that ugly enough for you?”“It’ll do,” Maren says.I put my cup down.“I’ll do it,” I say.Both of them start talking at once and I let them go for a moment, because I’ve spent six years being the quietest thing in every room and it turns out there’s a particular pleasure in being the reason people are shouting.“
최신 업데이트: 2026-09-03
Chapter: Chapter 13Ronan’s POV“Say it out loud,” Rhys says, “so you have to hear yourself say it.”We’re in Garrick’s own study with the door shut and his own brandy on the desk between us, and he’s locked in a room at the end of his own corridor with two of my men on it, which is illegal in about four different ways.“I’m claiming her.”“Under what.”“Pack claim. Article nine. A standing Alpha may extend claim over an unbound wolf in danger of trafficking across a border, and that claim carries the right of pursuit into neighboring territory without a council hearing.”“Article nine,” Rhys repeats. “Which was written for cargo runs and orphans, and which requires the wolf in question to be, and I’m quoting the actual document here, of the claiming Alpha’s household or intended household.”“Yes.”“So say the other part.”“Rhys.”“Say the other part,” he says, “because in about nine hours a clerk in Blackthorn Vale is going to read your paper out loud in front of witnesses, and I would rather you heard
최신 업데이트: 2026-09-03
Chapter: Chapter 12Wren’s POVThey keep her in a root cellar under a house with no smoke.Isen goes down the steps first with a lamp. Maren comes last, which puts me between them, and I have enough of my wits left to notice that neither of them planned it any other way.The cellar is cold and dry and smells like earth and old apples. Someone has put a real bed down here, and a chair beside it, and a shelf with a cup on it, and all that care makes what’s on the bed worse instead of better.She’s a woman about forty. Small. Grey at the roots and dark at the ends. Her hands are folded on top of a blanket that has been tucked in by someone who does it every day, and her eyes are open, and she is not in the room with us at all.“Nell,” Isen says. “I’ve brought somebody.”Nothing.“Eleven years?” I ask.“Eleven in the spring.”“Does she eat?”“If you put it in her mouth.” He sets the lamp down. “She walks, if you walk her. She sleeps when it’s dark. She’s a body doing the things a body does, and everything el
최신 업데이트: 2026-09-03
Chapter: Chapter 11Wren’s POVThe man who knows my name comes down to the water like he has all morning to do it.He’s fifty, maybe. Broad through the shoulders and gone soft over it, gray coming in at the temples, a coat that was expensive about a decade ago. Nothing about him is frightening. That’s the part my body objects to, because everything in me is standing up and screaming and it can’t tell me why.“Get in the boat,” Maren says behind me.“You said your mother’s people.”“I said a lot of things. Get in the boat.”“Maren.” The man stops six feet from the bank and puts his hands in his pockets. “You look old.”“I am old.”“You look it, though. That’s the difference.” He tips his head at me. “Does she know?”“She knows nothing.”“You’ve had six years.”“I’ve had six years of keeping her alive,” Maren says, “which is more than anyone standing on that bank can say.”They’re talking over my head like I’m furniture. Six years of that, and something in me has evidently run out, because I hear myself sa
최신 업데이트: 2026-09-03
Chapter: Chapter 10 Wren’s POVI wake up with my cheek against wet wood and no memory of falling asleep, which is becoming a theme in my life that I would very much like to stop.Everything smells like river.“Don’t sit up fast,” Maren says. “You’ll go over the side and I’m not going in after you.”She’s a shape against gray sky, sitting at the back of a flat boat with a pole across her knees. Reeds go past on both sides, taller than she is. My hands are in front of me, not tied, and there’s a wool coat over me that isn’t mine and smells like the herbs in her skin.“What happened.”“You don’t remember.”“No.”“Good,” Maren says. “That’s the dose working. It’ll wear off by tonight and then you’ll wish it hadn’t.”I get myself upright anyway. My head swings once and settles.“Where’s Garrick?”“In his house, I expect, telling a very large man a great many things six years too late.”“Where’s the thin man?”Maren’s pole comes out of the water, drips, goes back in. “Somewhere behind us, and not far enough,
최신 업데이트: 2026-09-03
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