All Chapters of Marked by the Alpha: Chapter 141 - Chapter 148

RyanI have been shot before and not with a gun but with words, with silence, with Zara turning away from me in a hallway once like I was something she could just close a door on. I thought I knew what it felt like to have something taken out of my chest without a mark on the skin to show for it.I didn't know anything because nothing, nothing, prepares you for watching the girl you love tell you to run in her own voice, her real one, cracked open like an egg and then watching her face go smooth and gold-eyed and calm again a half second later, like a light switching back off.The knife comes back toward my throat and I don't run. My legs don't even consider it. My back is against cold stone and my hand is still pressed over the mess at my neck, blood going warm and then cool between my fingers, and all I can think is: her hand is shaking now. It wasn't shaking before. Now it is."Zara," I say, or try to. It comes out wet and small, more shape than sound. "Zara, I'm right here."The w

RyanCrawling turns out to be a lot like everything else I've ever done for the people I love: stupid, necessary, and much more expensive than I budgeted for.My hand finds Zara's knee, and I hold on. The stone under my palm is slick with something I've decided not to identify. The wound at my throat pulses in time with my heartbeat, a wet, insistent little drum, and every time I swallow, the world tilts a few degrees to the left. I don't say that out loud. Zara's got enough to carry. She's got a whole night's worth of black up to her elbows and a voice like she's been dragged behind a truck, and if I add by the way, I think I'm bleeding out to the pile, she'll do something brave and reckless with it.So I say, "I've got you," and I try to make it sound like a fact.Her skin under my fingers is wrong...not cold, exactly. Cold I could handle. It's humming, a faint vibration like a phone buzzing against a wooden table in another room. I flinch before I can stop myself, and I feel her fe

RyanThere's a particular kind of stupid that only shows up after you've won. It's the stupid of a man who drives a pipe into a floor, watches a monster peel off him like smoke, and thinks, briefly and with total sincerity, well, that's that. I get to enjoy that feeling for maybe 4 seconds. I've decided to be proud of those 4 seconds, since they're all I'm going to get.Then the floor under Zara begins to open, and I stop being proud of anything.It doesn't crack...it would be easier if it cracked. It turns, a slow, greasy rotation, the stone sliding back on itself in wedges like the iris of an eye. Zara is in the middle of it, both palms flat, her hair hanging in her face, and she's not screaming, which is what scares me. Zara screams at parking meters, she's looking down at her own hands like they've said something she can't forgive."Ryan." Small. Flat. "I can't lift them.""Okay," I say. "Okay. That's fine. That's a problem with a solution.""You don't have a solution.""I have a

RyanThe first thing I notice is that I can't feel my hand anymore, and the second is that I can hear it. It sounds like a kettle just before it boils. A thin, high hum runs up the black threads under my skin and settles behind my ear. I keep my arm tucked against my chest like a stolen thing, and I watch the iron pipe bend.It doesn't bend like metal. It bends like a spine, slow and reluctant, with a sound like a long breath let out through clenched teeth."You're late, Edmund."The voice coming out of my own mouth, because that's what it is, that's what the thing is, a mouth borrowed from me, makes the hair on my arms stand up. It's a woman's voice, and it's older than I am. It's been sanded down by thirty-one years of nobody answering.Edmund gets off the crate. I don't think he decides to. His knees just quit holding the argument, and he slides to the floor and stays there, one hand out, palm up, like a man waiting to be handed something."Ada," he says."Don't." Her voice goes th