All Chapters of Marked By The Rogue Alpha: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

KieranI’d said it out loud once in eleven years, in a bed at Silverthorn with a hole in my side, to a woman who’d asked me a straight question and deserved a straight answer.Saying it in a room with a King in it was a different piece of work.“You’re not on trial,” Castien said, before he started. “You’re not required to give this.”“I know.”“Then say what you want to say and stop when you want to stop.”I told them about the horns.That’s where it starts if you’re honest about it. Silverthorn ran horns along the ridge line in weather because signals go down and men don’t. Nine posts. You count them going out and you count them coming back, and on the second night I stood in the lower guard house and listened to seven, then five, then three.“Meaning?” the King said.“Meaning they were through the gaps and coming down behind us faster than we could close them.”“Who were they?”“Border wolves from past the ridge. Not rogues the way your record has it.” I kept my voice level, becaus

MeredithHis name was Halden and he'd been a field secretary for twenty-two years, and he came into that room the way a man does when he's spent two days on a road working out what he's going to say and hasn't landed on it.He was seventy or near it. Grey, neat, and he'd put on a good coat to sit in front of a King, which somehow made it worse."You drafted the Blackridge finding," Castien said."I did.""Is this your draft?"He read it for longer than he needed to, and then he put his hand flat on the second page, on the paragraph about the relief force, and left it there."That's mine.""And this is the certified version."He read that one too. He read all eleven pages of it, and nobody hurried him, and when he got to the end he set it down and looked at the King."I've never seen this before," he said."Explain that," the King said."I drew the finding in the six weeks after the pass. I took the signals log and the position returns and the column's own paper, and I wrote what they

MeredithThey brought Garron up from Silverthorn under guard and put him in a chair with a cushion on it, which somebody had thought about, and it made him angrier than anything else in the room.He was eighty-one and he'd been shot at, beaten and driven three hundred miles, and he came in with his chin out looking for somebody to be furious with.He found Kieran in about two seconds and stayed on him."You'll want to speak up," he told Castien. "I'm deaf on the left and I'm not pretending otherwise for anybody's convenience.""Understood.""And I'm not saying one word that helps him.""You're not here to help anyone," Castien said. "You're here to say what you saw."So he said it.Slowly.It was the same account Elara had sat beside him for three days making certain somebody wrote down properly, except hearing an old man say it out loud wasn't the same as hearing a clerk read it.There had been twenty of them on the far side when the line broke.Garron and nineteen others.Eleven Sil

MeredithSilverthorn came.They'd been told they could and I don't think anybody expected forty of them, but they came down in the dark and they were outside that building from six in the morning, and by the time the doors opened there were more of them than there were seats.Silas had driven half the night. Sera came with Jordan, who still wasn't walking properly. Yara came, which meant somebody else was holding the infirmary. Mira came with the lower-quarters families and she'd put on the good coat she keeps for funerals, and Nessa was with her, and Lio had been made to wear shoes.And the eleven families came. All of them. Two of them had nobody left but a grandmother, and she came too.Kieran stood at the top of the steps and watched them come up, and he didn't say anything at all, and I stood beside him and let him not say it.The King sat at nine and he didn't waste any of it.Marius read the corrected finding first, all of it, and it took forty minutes and nobody in that hall m

MeredithHe came in and sat down on the end of the bed with the contract in his hand, and he put it on the covers between us instead of holding onto it, which I noticed."I'm going to say all of it in one go," he said. "Stop me if I get something wrong.""Go on.""Silverthorn has its own standing back. Register, seat, border recognition, routes without a sponsor. I don't need a coalition name on my paper and I'm not going to need one again in my lifetime." He kept his eyes on me while he said it. "Your father has his alliance and his debt closed and a daughter who's Luna of a pack the crown just stood up and apologised to, which is worth more to House Benic than anything he bargained for. He doesn't need this either.""No.""Yara says your wolf is as strong as it was before Alarick. That's her word, not mine, and she gave it to me in front of you a fortnight ago." He paused. "The crown withdrew the directive in full and there is nobody left in the territories with standing to tell you