Alle Kapitel von Marked By The Rogue Alpha: Kapitel 71 – Kapitel 80

AlarickI took the road too fast, and I didn't care.My phone sat on the passenger seat with the screen still lit, the trace report open where I'd left it, and every time the light caught the corner of my eye my grip tightened on the wheel until the leather creaked. My wolf sat right up under my skin, pressing, hot, and I let it, because if I stopped feeling it for even a second I'd have to think, and thinking only led me to one place.The account was anonymous, but it hadn't come from nowhere. Whoever pulled the favor for me had traced the whole ugly chain back through a private relay, and the relay ran out of House Benic. The messages that had gone around the bitter old wolves, the ones with the border grudge against Silverthorn, had all threaded through that one point. And the request to wipe it had come after the attack, once the smoke was up and the bodies were down, which told me the person doing it had known exactly what they'd helped light.I kept trying to hand it to someon

MeredithI woke before the house did.The light was still grey at the window and my mind wouldn't sit still, kept dragging me back to the garden, to his room, to the closed door and the thing that had almost happened on the other side of it. Lying there only made it louder. So I got up, pulled on the first dress my hand found, and went out to walk it off, because cold morning air was supposed to be good for a head that wouldn't quiet.Something was off before I'd cleared the second corridor.Two maids were whispering by the linen store. They stopped when they saw me, one dropping her eyes to the floor too fast, the other biting down on a smile that didn't quite go. I slowed. They found somewhere else to be.A guard at the lower stairs gave me a good morning like always, then looked away the second he'd said it and cleared his throat, and there was something in the throat-clearing I didn't like.Further down, two wolves were helping a wounded one along the wall, the young one with his

MeredithI had already decided I wasn't replying.The insult sat under Hayley's comment, and I read it twice and told myself it didn't matter. The account had four followers and a stolen picture for a face. Answering it would only feed it, and I'd already said everything I needed to say in the post itself. So I locked the phone and made myself listen to Silas.He was on about the angle again, that the picture had come from above, from a window or the gallery. I lasted a few seconds.The phone buzzed in my hand.I looked down before I'd decided to. Same insult, still there. Alarick dodged a bullet. My thumb drifted toward the reply box, hovered, and I dragged it back and locked the screen again.Silas said something about the older passages. Sera said whoever took it knew the house well enough to pick the right spot. Kieran asked whether an outsider could have gotten up there without being seen. I caught the shape of it and lost the middle, because the phone went off against my palm o

The Alpha KingThe official across the table had been talking for a while, and he stopped the moment I reached for my water.He didn't stop because I told him to. He stopped because I'd moved, and everyone at that table had spent years learning to watch my hands. Nine of the oldest bloodlines in the coalition sat around it, wolves who ruled their own territories like small gods at home, and here they waited on me to lift a cup before any of them dared finish a sentence. I set the water down. He picked the sentence back up where he'd dropped it.We were into the dull part of the day, a stretch of border two territories both wanted and neither would pay to hold, a grain shortage out east, a patrol report with three dead names on it that meant three letters I'd be writing myself. Then Marius laid another folder down in front of me, and Kieran Croft's name was on the front of it.I didn't sigh. I never let them see that. But my jaw set, because that name kept turning up on this table late

MeredithThe words landed, and I frowned before I'd thought about it, then turned to Kieran almost immediately.His eyes were already burning. He hadn't moved a muscle, but the air around him had pulled tight, and the wolves near enough to feel it had gone still.I stepped in and put my hand on his arm."I'll go," I said. "I'll do the interview."His jaw worked. He didn't argue, and he didn't agree either, but I felt the storm going on under my hand, pressed down and nowhere near settled."Meredith." Just my name, low."I know." I squeezed once and let go. "Let me."They didn't take us far in. Whatever the crown wanted, Kieran wasn't going to walk the King's man through the heart of Silverthorn, so we stopped at the wide receiving room off the front hall, the one kept for guests who weren't really guests. The hearth was cold. A long table ran down the middle of it, and the tall windows looked straight back out onto the drive, where I could still see wolves standing in the grey light,