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Chapter 38: The Man Who Looked Concerned
publish date:
2026-06-17 22:35:55
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Marked By The Rogue Alpha Chapter 44: Still Speaking
MeredithI crossed the yard with mud drying stiff on my dress and Kieran's no still ringing in my ears."Let him handle it," I muttered, and I dragged the next few steps out of myself like they cost money. "Handle it. Sure. He'll handle it.""Let him handle it," I said again, lower. "Right. Because it's his name they printed. His face they're all losing sleep over." I yanked a clump of mud off my sleeve and flicked it at the dirt. "'Let me handle it, Meredith.' Handle what, exactly? It's mine. The mark's mine, the mess is mine, and somehow the one mouth nobody wants to hear from is also mine." The path from the stables down to the lower yard was busy. Wolves moved through it with feed sacks and patrol gear and baskets of training clothes, and a few of them caught the state of my dress and looked away fast. One younger wolf kept staring a beat too long, until the woman beside him drove an elbow into his ribs."Ow—what was that for?" he hissed at her.She didn't bother answering. She
Marked By The Rogue Alpha Chapter 43: Alpha Croft's Dramatic Little Script
KieranI read it twice and felt the afternoon go out of me.The mud, the race, all of it drained off and left the cold thing underneath. Bloodmoon had gone through the coalition. They'd put it on the record. And I stood there reading the same polite sentence over while something tightened in my chest and stayed tight.Meredith was still close, watching my face instead of the notice. She'd already worked out from my expression that this wasn't Bloodmoon whining down a phone line again."Lay it out," I told Silas."They haven't accused us of anything."He kept his voice level. "That's the clever part. They've just asked, in writing, through the liaison, for assurance that she's safe, that no one's coercing her and that she can speak. If we sit on it, they say the silence is the answer. If we come back swinging, they say a clear conscience wouldn't need to swing." He shrugged. "Either way they've handed us a question we can't put down cleanly.""Then we don't swing." I folded the phone s
Marked By The Rogue Alpha Chapter 42: Not The Calm One
MeredithSera turned back around to face me, and I made myself sit still in the saddle and not look away from her, even though something in me wanted to.Kieran stayed where he was beside his own horse. He didn't step in, and I knew by now that the not-stepping-in was deliberate.The stable boy had found a strap to fuss with. It didn't need fussing with. He worked at it like his life depended on the buckle.I waited. Sera said nothing, and the silence stretched out long enough that I started to feel it crawl up the back of my neck, and I had to fight the urge to fill it for her.Then she looked at me, dead on, with something cold and flat in her eyes that I felt in my chest before I understood it."You want all of us to believe you can't be handled," she said. "That you walked in here and nobody puts a hand on you. But you gave Alarick five years to handle you. Five. So forgive me if I don't bow to the new version overnight."My grip tightened on the reins, and the gelding tossed his
Marked By The Rogue Alpha Chapter 41: The South Run
KieranThe rain line had been a mistake. I knew it the second it left my mouth.I'd only said it to break whatever she was building behind that stare. She'd been winding up to come at me, and I'd reached for the first thing that wasn't the call, and what came out was the weather. Now she was looking at me like I'd grown a second head, and I couldn't take it back.She'd had Alarick handled. I knew that. She didn't need me in there.But I wasn't going to stand in a doorway and listen to him call her weak. Not from him. Not from the man who'd spent years making her exactly that and then acting surprised to find her bent. He still knew where every old wound on her sat. He could press them without lifting a finger, over a phone, three packs away, and I'd had to listen to him do it.So I'd stepped in. And honestly? I'd say it again if he gave me the chance."Being right," Meredith was saying, "doesn't give you the right to walk into a fight I was already winning."We were back to this.Sh
Marked By The Rogue Alpha Chapter 40: The Voice He Thought He Still Owned
Meredith Ring. Ring. The phone buzzed against the table, and his name sat on the screen, lighting up and going dark and lighting up again. Alarick. I didn't pick it up right away. My hand hovered over it. The name did what the name always did. It put me back in the hall in the dress. It put me back in the five years I'd spent waiting, in the promises I'd taken at face value, in the version of him I'd loved before I learned what he chose when it mattered. Something shifted by the door. Just the brush of a sleeve against the frame, and I knew it was Kieran without looking. He'd stayed out in the corridor like he said he would, leaning there where he could hear me but not loom over the table. I didn't mind that he was there. That was the part I'd have to think about later, because some piece of me settled with him at that door, and I didn't have time for what that meant. I took a breath and pressed the green. "Meredith??" His voice came through, and it landed lower in me than I
Marked By The Rogue Alpha Chapter 39: Without Oversight
KieranI read it twice off Sera's phone.A direct welfare call with Meredith. No Alpha present. No Silverthorn authority in the room. Her on the line, alone."No."It was out before the room had finished breathing. My wolf had the answer before my head did, because all I could see was Alarick's voice in her ear and no one standing between them. The pressure came up off my skin before I caught it. The lamp on the desk buzzed in its base. Sera didn't flinch, but she went quiet for a second, which was her version of flinching."Refuse it and we look guilty," she said slowly. "Deny the call and Packline writes it as proof. Silverthorn Won't Let Her Speak. They don't even have to lie. They just print that you said no."I knew she was right.That was the worst part. Bloodmoon had found the one shape where keeping her safe looked exactly like keeping her caged, and there was no clean way to stand in it.My screen pinged.I looked. A trade office. The same neutral house whose man had stood
Marked By The Rogue Alpha Chapter 37: The Name They Printed
MeredithWe came off the walkway with his warning still sitting between us, and it didn't ease on the way back. I stayed half a step off him the whole way, close enough to feel that his anger had gone quiet instead of gone.The main packhouse felt wrong before I worked out why.A worker by the far
Marked By The Rogue Alpha Chapter 36: Not Like That
Meredith"Why's everyone saying it like he stole it?"Nolan's voice wouldn't leave my head. I followed Kieran away from the training yard with the question turning over and over, and Kieran didn't say a word after his last one, and somehow that was worse than the anger would have been.His steps st
Marked By The Rogue Alpha Chapter 35 :Sorry
I hesitated, because there was no harmless way to answer that.“You really want to know?”“I asked.”I looked back at the yard for a moment, then at him. “I heard Silverthorn broke coalition law.”His face did not change.“That you refused oversight,” I continued, quieter now. “That you closed your
Marked By The Rogue Alpha Chapter 34: The Name They Gave Him
Meredith"The houses are smaller down here," I said.He didn't slow. "They're older. We built outward from this part, not toward it."It was the most he'd given me since the yard, and I took it, because the silence had started to get hard to walk in. We were well past the administrative grounds by
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