All Chapters of Marked by the Alpha: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

ZaraFear looks strange on something that old. I watch it move across her face like weather across a landscape that's never had to learn what weather means, and for one heartbeat I let myself believe I've won something.Then her mouth curves, and I understand I haven't won anything at all. I've just made her curious."You really aren't afraid of me," she says, and Ryan's voice wearing her wonder sounds almost boyish, almost sweet, which is the worst version of wrong I've heard all night."The other four were afraid of me by the second sentence.""I stopped being afraid of things that wear people a long time ago." That isn't true. My hands are shaking. But she doesn't need to know that, and Ryan's fingers are still locked around my wrist like he's the one holding on instead of the other way around, and I need him to feel steady even if I have to lie with my whole body to give it to him."Bold," she says. "Foolish, but bold. I respect the distinction, even when I don't reward it."His c

ZaraThe glass doesn't just crack. It comes apart in a rain of small bright pieces, and my whole body flinches toward the sound before my mind catches up to what it means. Ryan doesn't move.He's standing three feet from me in the middle of the living room, exactly where he's been standing for the last twenty minutes, arms loose at his sides, head tipped slightly back like he's listening to something only he can hear. His chest still rises and falls. That's the only thing keeping me from screaming his name into the empty air between us. His chest still rises and falls, so some part of him is still in there, still breathing, still fighting whatever's wearing him like a coat two sizes too big.I don't know what broke the window. There's nothing outside. I checked twice already, pressed my face to the glass before it existed only in pieces on the carpet, and there was nothing there but the dark yard and the shape of the old oak we used to climb as kids. No wind strong enough...no bird, n

ZaraHis heart stumbles under my hands and I feel it before I understand it, that small catastrophic stutter, like a song skipping a beat it never comes back from cleanly."Ryan." I say his name again because it's the only thing I've got, the only rope I know how to throw. "Ryan, stay with me."His face is wrong. I've known this face since I was 6 years old, since scraped knees and shared popsicles and the specific way his nose scrunches when he's trying not to laugh at something he shouldn't find funny. I know every version of it, tired and drunk and heartbroken and furious, and none of those versions prepared me for this one, slack and cold and occupied by someone else."You don't get him," I say again, because I said it once already and it felt like the only true thing in the room, and I need it to still be true.The thing wearing him laughs. Not with his laugh, that's the worst part, some cousin of it, some cruel imitation that uses his mouth and his teeth and gets the shape almos

ZaraHis heart stops at 2:47 AM, and I know the exact second because I'm the one counting."No...no, no, no, come on..." My hands are locked over his sternum, arms straight, shoulders over wrists, doing compressions the way I've done them a hundred times on strangers who were never Ryan. Thirty compressions and two breaths, thirty compressions. The rhythm doesn't care that this is him. The rhythm doesn't care about anything."Zara, we need to move him, the ambulance is four minutes out...""Then we've got four minutes." My voice comes out steadier than I feel, which is the only trick I know. Compartmentalize...count. Don't look at his face, look at the compressions, look at the monitor, look at anything except the fact that his lips are going the wrong color.Eleven years I've known this face. I could draw it with my eyes closed... the crooked line where he broke his nose at fourteen, the way his left eyebrow sits a fraction higher than the right when he's about to say something stupi

ZaraThey keep telling me his vitals are stable now, like that word means anything after what I just watched happen in front of me...stable. My husband's heart stopped for four minutes and thirteen seconds and then it started again and somewhere in between his hand closed around mine so hard I still have the mark of his wedding ring pressed into my palm, and they want me to hear "stable" and feel better.I don't feel better. I feel like something walked into this room and hasn't left."Mrs. Cole." A nurse, young, kind eyes, the kind that haven't learned yet how to lie to families. "You can sit with him. He's not going to wake up for a while, the sedation, but you can sit."I don't remember agreeing to sedation. I don't remember agreeing to anything since the paramedics pulled me off him on our kitchen floor, since I stopped doing compressions because someone with steadier hands took over but I go sit.Ryan looks wrong. That's the only word I have for it, and I hate that it's the right