Todos os capítulos de Marked by the Alpha: Capítulo 131 - Capítulo 140

ZaraThe flashlight beam hit the doorway and everything in Zara went very quiet, the way a room goes quiet right before a storm walks through it.A man stood there...not tall enough to be threatening on size alone, but he filled the doorway anyway, the way certain people filled rooms without trying, like the space simply agreed to make room for them. His eyes caught the light and held it, flat, unblinking, amused."Well," he said. "Isn't this cozy."Beside her, Ryan made a sound that wasn't a word anymore. Zara didn't look at him. She couldn't, not yet, because if she looked at him and saw Damon's face settle into place behind his eyes, she was going to lose the thirty seconds she had left to think."Who are you," Petra said. Not a question...a demand, flat and edged, her blade still catching light at her hip."Wrong question." The man stepped into the room, unhurried, and his boots found the floorboards with a kind of deliberate softness, like he was savoring the creak. "Right questi

ZaraMy foot had already slid forward before I realized I was moving and Mara's fingers clamped around my arm. "Don't.""He said my name.""He's been saying it for a long time." She pulled me back from the top of the stairs, and I noticed how badly her hand was shaking. "Listen to me. He's going to talk to you, he's very good at it. Whatever he says, you do not answer him.""Why not?""Because every answer is a door, and he only needs one of them open.""A long time?" The words snagged in my head like a sleeve on a nail. "Mara, what does that mean? You disappeared. Four years, no calls, no letters, nothing. I thought you were dead.""I know.""That's all you're going to say?""For now, yes." Her voice cracked on the last word. "Please, Zara. Not here.""Oh, don't be so hard on her." The voice rose through the floorboards, warm and easy, like a man talking over dinner."Your sister has been very busy...she's had a lot to keep track of."I pressed my free hand flat against my mouth. I d

ZaraThe cold reached her first. It came up through the stone and settled between her shoulder blades, and for a few seconds Zara let herself believe that was the worst of it...just a cold floor, a bad dream, a room she would wake up out of.Then she looked at her hands...the tips of her fingers were black. Not bruised, not dirty...black, like ink that had soaked in and decided to stay, spreading toward her knuckles in thin, branching lines. When she curled them, something hummed under the skin, low and steady, like a wire pulled too tight."What happened to my hands?" she asked again, and her voice sounded like it belonged to someone much older."Nothing that wasn't already waiting to happen." The man was crouched in front of her, close enough that she could smell smoke on him. She had been trying not to look at his face. Every time she did, it slid away from her like a word on the tip of her tongue. "Give it time...it gets easier to look at.""Who are you?""Someone who has waited a

ZaraThe dark didn't come from outside and she understood that much, even as everything else slid out of focus like water down a drain... this dark had weight to it, texture, like someone had reached inside her skull and pulled a curtain across the only window she had left.Ryan.The name surfaced out of nowhere, a stone dropped into still water, and for one disorienting second she didn't know why it mattered, only that it did, that it mattered more than the blade she could feel resting loose and slack in her own trembling hand.Wait...my hand. Why is there a blade in my hand?She looked down and the black had crept further up her fingers, past the second knuckle now, spreading slow and certain like ink through water, and something about the shape of her own nails made her stomach drop, made her want to scream and found she couldn't remember how her throat worked."There you are," the man said, and his voice had that same unbearable gentleness to it, the kind that made her skin want t

ZaraI don't know when I started drowning, only that I am drowning now, and the water is black and it tastes like copper and it is inside me instead of around me...I can feel my own hand wrapped around a knife I did not choose to pick up.I want to scream and I have no mouth to scream with, not really, not one that answers me anymore. It's like being locked in the back seat of my own body while someone else drives, someone who knows all my roads, who takes every turn I would take, who even reaches for the radio the way I would, except it isn't music coming out. It's a stranger's voice, low and pleased, wearing my throat like a coat.I don't know you, it says, through me, to Ryan, and some small, screaming piece of me that is still Zara wants to claw its way up my own spine and shout the opposite. I do know you. I know you. I know the exact rasp your voice gets when you're about to fall asleep and fighting it, I know you hum off-key on purpose just to make me laugh, I know you'd rather