Lahat ng Kabanata ng Marked By The Rogue Alpha: Kabanata 61 - Kabanata 70

KieranI didn't answer her right away.I looked at her hand instead. It was resting near the edge of the bed, close enough that I could have reached it without stretching, and that small fact bothered me more than the wound pulling under my ribs. She'd stayed the night in a hard chair. She'd stood in that hall and heard the man laugh from the doorway. And now she was standing here asking me for the truth, and I couldn't hide behind the pain without knowing exactly what hiding would make me in her eyes."You should rest," I said. "This can wait until—"She didn't move. She just looked at me, level, and let me hear how thin it sounded.My jaw tightened, and the pain pulled hard enough that I had to breathe around it before I could speak again. She caught that too. Her anger flickered into worry for a second, the way it kept doing, but she didn't soften enough to hand me the exit."Garron," I said.Her expression shifted, because it was the first real thing I'd given her, and even his n

AlarickI was already at the doors of House Benic before the servants had them fully open.My hand was flat against the wood, pushing before they'd finished with the latch, and the two of them stepped back with their eyes down and didn't look at me again. They could feel it coming off me. My wolf sat too near the surface, my patience had run out somewhere on the road, and I'd stopped bothering to hide either.I'd driven straight here from the dark stretch where I'd stopped the car. Silverthorn burning at the ridge. Meredith not answering a single call. Clover gone from Bloodmoon the same night, the seat beside me empty when I reached for her out of habit. And that soft patient line of hers turning over in my head the whole way. I have a plan. She'd said it days ago, after the last one fell apart in our hands, and I'd let it pass because I hadn't wanted to think about anything but Meredith. I was thinking about it now.I heard footsteps on the polished floor and turned.Aldric came d

MeredithI'd been dressed for a while, yet I was still standing in the middle of the room.I tugged my sleeve straight for the third time. My fingers drifted up to the edge of the mark at my throat, and I made them stop. I'd already decided I was going to look in on him, and now I couldn't get my feet to start, because a small mean voice kept asking whether walking straight to his door the morning after made me look like a woman who couldn't stay away.He was the Alpha. That was the reason. He'd been carried in bleeding, and a Luna ought to know whether the man who led her pack had made it through the night. That was all it was.I left before the voice could talk me out of it.The hallway still wore the night. Someone came the other way with a stack of empty medicine bowls. A guard by the stairs had the grey, sunken look of a man who hadn't slept, and a healer moved past with her steps soft, the way people move when they've spent hours near the badly hurt.I braced for the first guard

MeredithThe room was too quiet now.A minute ago I'd been on the floor with no breath left from laughing, and he'd been half-choking on his own medicine, but the laughter was gone now and he was still looking at me. The empty cup hung loose in his hand, and his eyes had dropped to my mouth and stayed there a beat too long.My breath caught.It wasn't like the treatment hall, and it wasn't like the first time right after the mark, when there'd been blood and panic and a dozen reasons to pretend none of it meant anything. Elara was gone, and so was the healer, so there was nothing left in the room to hide behind. I just stood there and let him look at me like he'd forgotten how to stop.Then he stopped himself.He cleared his throat, turned his head away, and set the cup down on the side table. "I need to see how bad the damage is," he said, flat and even, "and check on my people."He said it like a door swinging shut, as if the last few seconds hadn't happened at all."Coward," I mutt

Meredith I froze, and it had nothing to do with fear.He'd heard me. The word I'd muttered at his back in the room hadn't dropped into nothing after all. It had followed him all the way down here, and now he was giving it back to me with my spine against a tree and his mouth close enough that I couldn't think straight. Heat climbed my face, but I was not going to let him watch me lose."Waiting until you've got me pinned to a tree to answer," I stubbornly said despite my racing heart, "doesn't make you brave."His mouth barely moved, but something in his eyes sharpened, and I knew he'd heard the fight still in me even while my heartbeat went and gave me away. He smiled softly and I felt my heart flutter.It hit me then, all at once, that we were outside. The garden wasn't closed off. The path sat close enough that a servant or a guard or somebody's family coming from the lower hall could round the trees at any second and see exactly this. The thought should have made me shove him off