All Chapters of Marked By The Rogue Alpha: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

135 Chapters

Chapter 101: Five Years Were Not Permission

MeredithHe waited for me to answer like he had laid something valuable between us and expected me to understand what it had cost him.While he spoke, his body had turned toward mine. His hand moved across the table before he caught himself and pressed it flat against the wood. He thought the confession was the hardest thing he owned. He thought giving it to me would make me soften.But he still had not heard himself.He thought admitting he had underestimated me was the same as being sorry. What he had actually admitted was that he heard my warning, weighed it against five years of forgiveness, and decided my love would hold.The longer I sat with it, the uglier it became.“Do you hear yourself?” I asked.His brow tightened. “I hear myself fine.”“Then say it again.”“I knew you would be hurt.” He opened one hand between us. “I knew you would be furious. But we had five years, Meredith. You do not throw five years away because of one terrible day. I believed we would get through it.

Chapter 102: A Woman You Had Already Lost

Meredith“No. You’re going to hear this one.”He came away from the window with his hand still wrapped around the shutter latch. He held it for another second before letting go.“Two hundred acres above the south coast road,” he said. “I bought it in March. I never told you because you spent a year talking about that water like you’d already lived there. You had the rooms planned. You had names for them.”His voice rose with every sentence.“Am I supposed to believe none of that was real? That I imagined an entire year of it?”“It was real.”He stopped.“I meant every word,” I said. “The house, the water, all of it. I’m not going to sit here and pretend I invented a future with you to be polite. I wanted it.”“Then—”“Do you remember the night I didn’t come to bed?”He hesitated. “Which night?”“That answers the question.”“Meredith.”“The bathroom floor,” I said. “March.”His face changed slightly.“The tiles were so cold my legs went numb, but I stayed there because every time I rea

Chapter 103: The Man in the Guesthouse

MeredithHe didn't answer.I'd watched him fight me for an hour over the wedding and my wolf and my marriage, and he'd never once needed a run-up. Now he stood with his hand on the back of the chair and looked at the door instead of at me, and whatever was behind it had nothing to do with the two of us.The inner door opened before he found anything to say.Castien came back in without the case. He'd been gone long enough to hand it to his escort and see it onto the road. He stopped two steps inside because he'd walked into something and he knew it.Alarick's eyes went to him, then came back to me.I didn't repeat the question. I sat down again and folded my hands and let him have the room."He came to my gate on foot," Alarick said at last. "No vehicle, no escort, nothing on him but what he was carrying. He'd worked out that the crown would have him in a cell inside a day if anyone learned his name, so he brought me the truth and asked for protection in exchange for it.""What's his

Chapter 104: Nothing Left to Bargain With

MeredithAlarick didn't go pale and he didn't sit down. He got angry."Say exactly what you mean by that," he said. "Be precise, because I'll be repeating it to my own council tonight. Reddick was paid four days ago. The forgery was made months before that, on Clover's money, in a rented office I'd never heard of. I bought the truth off a frightened man. I didn't order the lie.""That distinction matters," Castien said. "I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting otherwise, and I'll write it exactly that way.""Then what are you suggesting?""That paying him proves nothing on its own, in either direction." Castien didn't take his eyes off him. "The crown will work out what happened by putting it all beside each other. Reddick's testimony. What day he arrived at your gate. The account the money came out of. Both letters, once we have them. Your messages." A pause. "And the fact that you sat on a witness and a piece of evidence while a royal ultimatum was running against her.""I sat o

Chapter 105: Open the Gate

MeredithThe bond got warmer with every mile, and by the last of them I could feel him the way I used to feel him from across a room.He hadn't slept. That came through first and it wasn't even close. Under it there was the tightness he'd been carrying since he watched my car go, and under that the restless thing that wouldn't settle anywhere, and then, as the wall came up black out of the trees, relief started coming through in pieces faster than he could get a hand over any of it.He'd kept it open. Ten hours, three territories and a royal receiving house, and he hadn't shut it once."Gate's coming up, Luna," the driver said.It was already moving. The iron came apart down the middle before we'd finished the bend, so somebody had been standing at the controls waiting for the sound of an engine, and beyond it the yard was full.They'd come out the same way they had when I left. Fighters near the wall with their arms crossed. The kitchen staff crowded onto the storehouse steps. Two of

Chapter 106: The Papers He Signed

KieranI'd had two days to work out how to say it, and I still took her into the study like a man walking to something he'd rather not reach.She came without asking a single question, which was worse. Ten minutes ago she'd had her hand in my shirt in front of the whole yard, and now she walked beside me down my own corridor with her coat still on, and every step of it I could feel her waiting for whatever this was going to be.The study was cold. Nobody had been in it since I'd gone down to the gate."Sit if you want," I said."I've been sitting in a car for three hours."So she stayed on her feet by the desk, and I went to the door and put my head out and told the wolf in the corridor to find Silas.He came fast. He'd been somewhere close since the gate, the way he always was when he thought I might need something I hadn't asked for yet, and he stopped when he saw the two of us in that room with the lamp not even lit."The sealed packet," I said. "From the cabinet."He looked at me.

Chapter 107: The Hour After You Promised Me

Meredith"That same morning," he said. "Within the hour."I stood there with his signature under my thumb and thought about how badly I'd wanted to see his face at that gate.Three hours in a car with my eyes stinging, feeling him get closer through the bond and letting it steady me, and he'd been standing on that gravel with this in a cabinet twenty feet behind him.The idiot."How long is not long?" I said."I don't know the minute. Silas was in the study and I went straight there from the walkway." He didn't move. "It wasn't the afternoon, if that's what you're asking. It was the same conversation."I remembered the walkway. I remembered exactly what I'd said to him, that his protection was starting to feel like a cage and he didn't get to decide my future in a corridor while I stood there and watched him do it. I remembered him agreeing. I remembered the words then we fight it, together, because I'd carried them around for four days like something worth having.Then he'd walked of

Chapter 108: The Kind That Comes Back Up

MeredithIt was late when I went to him.The lamp was still on in the room and he was sitting up with reports across his knees that he plainly hadn't been reading, and when the door opened he straightened like a man who'd been waiting a long time for the second round."Before you start," he said, "I've had four hours to think about it, and I want to say that I've come round to your position entirely, and I've always thought so, and any suggestion otherwise is a slander.""Have you.""Completely. I'm a reformed man. Silas can confirm it in writing.""Silas would sell you for a quiet week.""He would." He put the reports on the table. "So would I, at this point."I stood in the doorway with my arms folded and let him sit there in it a moment longer, because he deserved a moment longer."I'm still angry," I said."I know.""And it's not the polite kind of anger. The kind that's going to come back up in a fortnight over something stupid.""I know that too."I came into the room and stoppe

Chapter 109: Two Payments

MeredithWe went in together, and that was the only part of the morning I'd settled in advance.The room they'd opened up at Halvern for this was three times the one where Alarick had put the letter into Castien's hands. Long table down the middle, the crown's people along one side with their files squared in front of them, and chairs set out so that nobody sat directly across from anybody else. Two recorders this time instead of one. A clerk at the far end with a stack of tagged folders that had been sitting there before any of us arrived.Alarick was already in his seat when we came through the doors.He'd changed his shirt and not much else, and there was a nick under his jaw where he'd shaved again in a hurry. An aide stood at his shoulder saying something into his ear, and he wasn't taking any of it in. He had a folder of his own in front of him that he kept straightening, a quarter turn one way, a quarter turn back, until Castien came in and he stopped.Kieran pulled my chair ou

Chapter 110: The Man Who Made Both Letters

MeredithThey brought him in between two royal wolves, and he came through the doors the way a man does when he's spent the last stretch of his life being moved from one locked room to another by people who don't tell him why.I'd built him differently in my head. For four days I'd had a picture of somebody clever and cold sitting under a lamp with my father's seal and a steady hand.The man in the doorway had a beard that had gone past untidy into neglected, a coat that had been slept in more than once, and ink worked into the sides of his fingers so deep that scrubbing had only made the skin around it raw. He looked at the recorders first. Then at the officers along the wall. Then, very briefly, at Kieran, and after that he kept his eyes down.He was afraid of every single person in that room, and he had good reason to be, because between the crown, House Benic and the two Alphas at that table there wasn't one of us who couldn't cost him something."Sit," Castien said.He sat."Befo

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