All Chapters of Marked By The Rogue Alpha: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

135 Chapters

Chapter 111: The Part She Can't Explain

MeredithIt went on for another forty minutes and it went the same way each time.Castien would read a line off Reddick's statement, the clerk would find where it lived in the crown's own records, and the two of them would agree. The Ostmark account. The staged payments. A hotel bill in the trading quarter that Reddick had never mentioned and couldn't have known they held.Clover fought every one of them. She was good at it, better than anyone at that table expected, and twice she made Castien go back and check something a second time. But each round finished in the same place, with the clerk saying yes, envoy, and the pen moving, and my sister's list of things left to argue getting shorter.Then Castien turned a page and asked when Pell had last been paid, and Clover stopped fighting.She sat back in her chair. She put her hands in her lap. For about ten seconds she looked at the far wall and worked something out."Envoy," she said. "May I put something to the inquiry.""If it's an a

Chapter 112: The Photograph

MeredithThey reconvened at two, and my sister came back into the room a different woman.Not broken. Clover doesn't break in front of an audience. But the reasonable voice was gone, and so was the grey dress arrangement of hands in the lap, and she sat down between two officers without arranging anything at all. She'd stopped playing to the table. That worried me more than the morning had.My father didn't come back. He'd said his piece and gone, and his chair had been taken away rather than left empty, which somebody had decided on purpose."We're going to deal with the photograph," Castien said.The clerk brought a board down the table and stood it up where the whole room could see, and there it was.I'd never actually looked at it. That's the part I hadn't said out loud to anyone. It had come down on Silverthorn as a directive read out in a courtyard, and after that it was a thing everyone in my life had seen except me, and I'd let it stay that way because I'd had a house to run a

Chapter 113: What Alarick Actually Did

MeredithHe took the oath standing, and when Castien asked whether he wanted anyone at the table with him, he said no."For the record," Alarick said, "nobody compelled me here. I drove myself and I sat down.""Noted." Castien didn't look impressed by it. "We'll go in order. Start before there was any evidence at all."Kieran's hand was over mine on the table where he'd put it yesterday, and he hadn't moved it since we came in."Who did you speak to first?""Two Alphas off the northern trade council." Alarick gave their houses and the clerk wrote them down. "And a wolf in the King's office I've known nine years. I'd want it clear that I didn't accuse Croft of anything to any of them.""Then what did you do?""I told them I was worried about her.""Worried in what terms?""That she'd left Bloodmoon unwell. That she was marked inside a fortnight by a man with a reason to want her family's name. That nobody outside Silverthorn had heard her speak without him standing there." He said it e

Chapter 114: Nothing Left to Say in a Room

MeredithWe had two rooms in a house on the far side of Halvern's wall, above a yard that took the evening light, and I got out of that building and walked the whole way there without saying anything.Kieran didn't push it. He walked on my left and set his pace to mine, which was slower than his, and he was doing that for reasons that had nothing to do with me."Your side," I said."It's fine.""You've been sitting on a wooden chair for six hours with a hole in you.""Then it's not fine and there's nothing to be done about it tonight."Silas was in the yard with two of ours when we came in, and he looked at my face and decided against whatever he'd come to say, which I was grateful for. Kieran told him to keep the lower door and nobody past it, and then it was the stairs and a door and the two of us.The room had a window seat. I sat on it with my knees up and my back to the frame and looked out at somebody else's roof."Say it," he said."There's nothing to say. He was accurate. He d

Chapter 115: You Said You Were Saving Me

MeredithCastien gave us a room on the ground floor with one high window, a table, two chairs and an officer standing inside the door with a recorder on the sill beside him."Forty minutes," he said to me in the corridor. "If she starts using it to build something, I'll end it whether you want me to or not."Kieran took the wall opposite the door and put his shoulder against it and didn't sit down."Nine forty," I said."I'll be here."They'd taken her rings off her.That was the first thing I saw, because Clover has worn the same two since she was fifteen and her hands looked wrong without them, and she'd noticed me notice."They itemise everything," she said. "There's a man who writes down what you were wearing."I sat."You asked for this," I said. "So ask."She put her hands on the table."I thought he had you," she said. "That's where it starts and I'm not going to dress it up for a recorder. You went out of Bloodmoon in a wedding dress with a wolf that wasn't answering you, and

Chapter 116: The King Comes In

MeredithHe came in at four with his coat still on and his aide half a step behind him, and he was already in a bad mood before he'd reached the table.Everybody stood. He waved it down before we'd finished, and then he pulled a chair out at the head of the room and sat in it and put his hand out, and the aide had a folder in it before his arm was fully extended."Marius. The dates.""Majesty.""Not the summary. The dates."I'd built him differently as well. I'd had a picture of somebody polished, and what came in was a big man in a travelling coat who read four lines, put the folder down and looked around a room like it had been left in that state deliberately to annoy him."The directive went out of my office," he said, "on a page nobody had put a glass to. Whose decision was that?"Castien said, "The authentication was requested, Majesty. The directive did not wait for it.""I know it didn't wait. I signed the thing that didn't wait." He said it flatly, and it took the room a momen

Chapter 117: Clover Benic

MeredithThe capital's examination came in at eight and Castien read it before the King sat, because the King wanted it in the record before anybody in that room opened their mouth.It ran four pages and it said one thing.Two documents. Different paper stock from different runs, different ink, and a seal impression on the second one cut from a mould rather than pressed from the die that made the first. Every line of Kieran's letter present on both, and the paragraph about my wolf and my mark present on one, added after the fact by a hand working to match what was above it."For the avoidance of doubt," Castien said, "the crown finds as a matter of physical evidence that Alpha Kieran Croft did not write the paragraph on which this inquiry was opened. It was manufactured."Nobody cheered. It wasn't that kind of room.Kieran took a breath in and let it out, and that was all he did.They brought Clover in at half past.She'd worked out overnight what she had left, and she spent it straig

Chapter 118: The Order Comes Off

MeredithCastien read the withdrawal at eleven and it took two minutes.The directive of the fifth was withdrawn in full. The requirement that I enter royal custody, gone. The requirement that I open annulment proceedings against my husband, gone, and the crown recorded that no proceeding had ever been opened and none would be. The finding on my judgment came next, and it was longer than it needed to be, which I understood once I heard the last clause of it.The crown records that its directive proceeded on an unauthenticated document and on a third party's characterisation of the Luna's private correspondence, and that it treated that characterisation as more reliable than the Luna's own sworn answers. The error was the crown's.They'd put it in.The King wasn't in the room when it was read. I don't know whether that was deliberate.Then the practical part, and Castien read it slower because he knew what was in it.Silverthorn's coalition protections restored. The sanction hold lifte

Chapter 119: Blackridge Pass

MeredithCastien didn't tell me to sit down, which I'd half expected.He looked down the corridor once, at the officers moving folders out of the hearing room, and then he came back and lowered his voice."Luna, I'll give you the honest version and you won't like it either. The crown restored your husband's protections because this inquiry proved a forgery. It didn't restore his standing because his standing wasn't taken by a forgery. It was taken by a finding, eleven years ago, that has never been overturned and that nobody has ever formally asked to reopen.""Then I'm asking.""You can't. It isn't yours." He said it without unkindness. "The standing belongs to Silverthorn. Only Silverthorn's Alpha can put that in front of the crown."I turned round.Kieran was where he'd been the whole time, with his shoulder near the window frame and his hands loose, and he'd heard every word of it and hadn't said one.And I was about two seconds from telling him what he was going to do.I heard it

Chapter 120: The Men Who Never Came

MeredithThe column's own paper came up from the capital in two boxes and they opened them in front of us, which I understood was the King making a point to his own office rather than to us.Marius read the movement orders first.The relief force had been raised out of three houses and put under coalition field command, and it had moved out on the ninth, and by early on the tenth it had made the eastern shoulder of Blackridge and stopped there."Stopped," the King said. "Not halted by contact.""There's no contact logged, Majesty. It made the shoulder and it held position.""For how long?""Fifty-one hours."Nobody said anything for a moment. I did the arithmetic in my head and I did it slowly, and I still got to the same place everybody else in the room had got to.Kieran had sealed the road late on the eleventh."Read the signals," the King said.The signals log was a thin book with a column of times down the left of every page, and Marius went through it line by line because the Ki

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