All Chapters of Marked by the Alpha: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

RyanThe word hung there and nobody moved to catch it. Two years and I heard Petra say it and some part of my brain refused to file it where it needed to go, like a door that wouldn't shut all the way no matter how hard I pushed it."Say that again," I said."Ryan...""Say it again, Petra. Slowly."She flinched at my voice but she didn't look away this time. "Jude has been talking to Damon since the western track. Two years, Ryan. I found out by accident and he begged me not to tell you and I didn't know how to undo that once I'd already promised."I looked at Jude and he wasn't running. That was the first strange thing, the thing that didn't fit, because if this was true he should have already been three steps down the hallway, out the back door, gone. Instead he stood there with his hands loose at his sides and something on his face that looked almost like relief."Is it true," I said."Ryan, let me explain...""That's not what I asked you."He was quiet for a second. Long enough th

ZaraThe figure in the doorway held the small pale thing up like he wanted us all to see it clearly, like he'd rehearsed the exact way to hold his arm so the firelight caught it.It was a shoe. My mother's shoe, the soft grey one she wore around the house because her feet hurt in anything stiffer.My whole body went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the night air."Zara." Ryan's voice, low, right beside my ear. "Don't move.""That's her shoe.""I know.""He wants me to see it. He wants me to lose my mind right now and run at that cabin.""I know that too." His hand found mine in the dark and squeezed once, hard. "So don't give it to him."I made myself breathe. In through the nose, slow, the way my mother taught me when I was small and scared of thunder. She used to say panic is just your body trying to run before your brain has finished thinking. I hated that she was the one who taught me that, and that she was the reason I needed it right now.The figure in the doorway wasn'

ZaraThe gunshot didn't come from where it should have. That was the only thought I had room for, one clean fact slicing through everything else, because Ryan's whole body had gone rigid over mine and I could feel it in the way he was holding his breath.Then the cabin door slammed open, and it wasn't my mother stumbling into the light, it was Jude.His hands were bound in front of him with something dark, wire maybe, and his mouth was taped, and he was moving the way a person moves when they've been shoved harder than their legs can handle, stumbling, going down on one knee in the dirt before catching himself."That's..." My voice came out strangled against the cold ground. "Ryan, that's Jude.""I see him.""He's tied up, somebody tied him up.""I see that too."Damon had gone very still by the doorway, and for the first time all night his face wasn't doing anything calm or amused. He looked like a man watching his own plan come apart in front of him, which should have felt like good

ZaraThe shape kept walking, unhurried, the same way Cole had walked, like the night belonged to it, and I felt Ryan's whole body lock beside me the way it never locked for anything."Ryan." My hand was still buried in his arm. "Who is that."He didn't answer, that was the answer."You said you buried him." My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "You said that, I heard you say that.""I did bury him.""Then who is walking toward us right now."Martha moved half a step in front of me without seeming to decide to do it, the way she always did when something in the dark stopped making sense, and I hated her for it a little, hated being handled, but I let her because my legs had gone strange and unreliable under me.The moon caught the shape's face for just a second as it crossed the open ground, and I knew him. Not the way you know a stranger's face from a description, the way you know your own front door in the dark, without needing to look at it straight on. Simon.Except Simon

RyanI didn't want to look either, but somebody had to, and it wasn't going to be Zara."Martha, get her up. Get Jude up, whatever it takes, we're moving.""He can't move, Ryan, look at him, he can't even hold his own head...""Then we carry him, we are not standing here."Zara's arm was rigid under my hand, every muscle in her fighting the order not to turn around, and I understood that fight because I was losing the same one myself, my eyes dragged sideways toward the tree line no matter how hard I told them not to.What came out of the dark wasn't Elias. I'd braced for Elias, for that same slow, patient shape we'd been running from all night, and some small, stupid part of me had already decided I knew the shape of my fear. I was wrong. This was smaller, quicker, wrong in a different key entirely, and it took me a full second of staring to understand why my stomach had dropped before my mind caught up.It was Simon, not Simon standing at the tree line the way he had been, sympatheti