All Chapters of Marked By The Rogue Alpha: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

MeredithI woke after a night that hadn’t given me much, with the rumor still sitting in my head where I’d left it.The room was quiet. I wasn’t. Pieces of the day before kept surfacing whether I wanted them or not. The phone in my hand. Alarick’s words. Kieran standing too close while the feed filled with strangers deciding what my mark meant. None of it had softened overnight.I got ready slowly, my movements quieter than they needed to be. My hand reached for a scarf out of habit, fingers already brushing the folded fabric before I stopped.The mark warmed beneath my collar.I stared at the scarf for a moment. Then I left it where it was.I was not going to hide, because I was tired, and hiding it would only have made me feel worse, so I didn’t. Kieran was in the corridor before I reached the breakfast hall.He saw the mark right away. His gaze dropped to it for half a second, then came back to my face.“You’re going to breakfast,” he said.I gave him a look. After everything, tha

Meredith"The houses are smaller down here," I said.He didn't slow. "They're older. We built outward from this part, not toward it."It was the most he'd given me since the yard, and I took it, because the silence had started to get hard to walk in. We were well past the administrative grounds by then, past the places Silverthorn had put up to keep its order, and the further down we went the rougher it got. The receiving yard was still sitting with me as we walked. I kept turning over the cold way he'd made that man stand inside his own words, and how close his anger had come to the surface before he folded it into a route and three cycles and a cost the man could actually feel.He hadn't brought me down here for the air, that much I was sure of, but I knew better than to push him for the reason before he was ready to give it. I heard shouting, and my body went tight, because I'd had enough of arguments for one morning.The sound changed as we got closer and I realized with a start

Meredith"Why's everyone saying it like he stole it?"Nolan's voice wouldn't leave my head. I followed Kieran away from the training yard with the question turning over and over, and Kieran didn't say a word after his last one, and somehow that was worse than the anger would have been.His steps stayed even. But every wolf we passed reacted before he reached them. Guards straightened. Workers stepped aside. A woman carrying a stack of folded training cloths dropped her head and kept her eyes on the ground until we were past her. His aura wasn't all the way out, and still enough of it bled into the air to change the way people breathed around him.I felt it against my skin, and the mark made it worse. His anger wasn't only in the air near me. It felt closer than that, like something under my own pulse was answering him before I'd decided whether I wanted it to.He wasn't angry at Nolan. I worked that out as we walked. He was angry that a child had heard the rumor at all.Silas caught u

AlarickThe story was everywhere by mid-morning.I had it open on my screen and I kept refreshing it. Every time I did, the count climbed. The neutral markets had it. The trade boards had it. The packs that leaned Bloodmoon were already repeating it like they'd seen it themselves.I'd wanted this.That was what I kept telling myself, and it kept not being true. The spreading didn't touch the part that mattered. She was marked. Kieran's mark. And every wolf with a phone knew it now.I read the same two lines again.Alpha Kieran Croft removed her from the hall.He'd carried her. I hadn't known that until I read it like a stranger, off a bulletin.I clenched my fist, only stopping when I felt a sharp building pain from my nails biting into my palm.He'd had his hands on her, taken her out in front of his pack, and somewhere in the days after that she'd let him put his teeth in her throat.I made myself stop reading as I looked up to catch the person still talking in front of me.A servan

Meredith Ring. Ring. The phone buzzed against the table, and his name sat on the screen, lighting up and going dark and lighting up again. Alarick. I didn't pick it up right away. My hand hovered over it. The name did what the name always did. It put me back in the hall in the dress. It put me back in the five years I'd spent waiting, in the promises I'd taken at face value, in the version of him I'd loved before I learned what he chose when it mattered. Something shifted by the door. Just the brush of a sleeve against the frame, and I knew it was Kieran without looking. He'd stayed out in the corridor like he said he would, leaning there where he could hear me but not loom over the table. I didn't mind that he was there. That was the part I'd have to think about later, because some piece of me settled with him at that door, and I didn't have time for what that meant. I took a breath and pressed the green. "Meredith??" His voice came through, and it landed lower in me than I