Alle Kapitel von Marked By The Rogue Alpha: Kapitel 81 – Kapitel 90

KieranI stood a stride from the closed door and did not move.Silas waited near me, saying nothing, watching the royal guards the way I was watching the door.I wouldn't pace. I wouldn't give the King's men the pleasure of seeing the Rogue Alpha wear a track in his own floor while his wife answered questions he wasn't allowed in the room to hear.My side pulled under the bandage each time my weight shifted, so I stopped shifting it.The door was heavy, and it gave me nothing. A chair moving. Low voices, hers and his, the shapes of words without the words. I stood in it and breathed slow and let my wolf press up under my skin without letting it any further.A woman standing beside her husband will always say what keeps the peace at her own table.That was the line I kept coming back to. It sat wrong in me, because whatever else Meredith was, she had never once opened her mouth to keep a peace. Not for Alarick. Not for her father. Not for me, who'd had the sharp end of her tongue more

KieranThe crown hadn't laid a finger on us yet, and Silverthorn was already bleeding by morning.The ultimatum had gone through the coalition channels overnight, quietly, the way that kind of thing always travels, and by the time the sun was up our partners had started pulling their arms in close. Silas brought it to me before I'd finished dressing."The Harrow medicine run's been held," he said. "Not cancelled. Held. Their steward sends regret and says the roads are 'uncertain' this week.""The roads are fine.""The roads are coalition-controlled, Alpha, and that's the point he's making without making it." He didn't look up from his tablet. "And Ostmark's put a line in writing. If the Luna refuses the crown, they won't risk their standing keeping our route open. They'd sooner lose our trade than lose the King's good opinion."So it began without a single sanction signed. A shipment we needed sitting on someone else's dock, a road that might close, partners who'd smiled at me a week

Waiting was the part I'd never learned, so I didn't. I forwarded Alarick's sworn statement to Hayley instead.She called back inside ten minutes, and she didn't bother with hello."I've read it twice," she said, "and I need you to hold still while I'm angry, because there's a lot and it's load-bearing.""Hayley—""Failing wolf. Yes. I documented that. Exhaustion, weight loss, disrupted sleep, bond deterioration, panic episodes, every word of it's in my records because I wrote my records properly." Her breath came short down the line. "Now find me the page where I wrote that your judgment was impaired. Find the line where any healer, anywhere, ever, wrote that Meredith Benic couldn't understand a decision put in front of her. It doesn't exist, Mer. A sick body is not an incompetent mind, and he's welded the two together and sworn to it in front of a King.""He had the messages I sent him. The healer's notes I forwarded—""Which makes him a man with a folder, not a doctor." She bit eac

He said it evenly, and it landed like a door.“The letter isn’t there,” he said. “No one signed it out. The seals were intact when I opened the archive this morning, and there was no other way into the room. Whoever took it walked through the door.”His eyes settled on me.“Very few people had access. You were one of them. Then you told the Alpha King, under your own name, that the original was still in my archive.” His voice hardened. “I have just sworn to the crown that it isn’t.”I got my breath back and reached for the only ground still under me."Then someone took it after I did." I sat forward. "That's not proof of anything, Father. Half this house has legitimate access to that room. The steward. The archivist. Two clerks. Meredith herself has an access record that was never revoked when she left, did you think of that? Anyone could have gone in behind me and lifted it, and now you're sitting there deciding it was me because I'm the one standing in front of you.""You're right."

Blackridge.So that was what the pass was called. Kieran and Elara had never used the name. To them, it had always been just the pass—the place where the reinforcements never came and Kieran returned branded a rogue."I asked to question him with no Alpha and no officer of Silverthorn in the room," Castien said. "Croft agreed to it. Garron agreed too, on one condition.""Which was?""That Lady Elara stayed."Kieran said nothing at the window."She set her own terms as well." Castien said it without complaint, almost with respect. "Everything recorded, start to finish. A signed copy of the statement in Garron's hand before I left the room.”He paused. “She never once answered for him or told him what to say, I'll be clear about that, she let the old man speak. But every time I summarised him, every time I took what he'd said and put it into the language a report wants, she stopped me and made me set down his words instead of mine."The door opened.Elara came in with her coat still on