All Chapters of Marked, Not Kept: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Maya kept the napkin.She'd meant to throw it out. Instead she carried it home in her jacket pocket like it might bite, and she set it on the counter under the one lamp that still worked, and she looked at it instead of sleeping.Three words. Black pen. Handwriting she never saw get made.Run. He'll follow.Which was a hell of a thing to leave a girl. Seeing as the man who'd sat across from her that morning had said the exact opposite. Don't run from me again. Next time I won't be gentle. Two orders, dead against each other, and Maya couldn't tell which one was the trap.She'd gotten through her shift somehow. Poured coffee. Dropped a plate. Watched the door every time the bell went. It never went for him. Not the yellow-eyed one, Wilder, and not the blond one in the suit either. All day, nothing. And that was almost worse, because it meant they didn't have to hurry. Whatever this was, they already knew how it ended.Mr. Damien clocked her twice. Once when she dropped the plate, once

Wilder shut the door on Sloane.He didn't slam it. Didn't yell. He just took the edge of it and closed it, slow, in her face, and the sound of that soft click was worse than anything he could have shouted. A slam was a man losing his grip. This was a man who didn't have to lose it. Who could take a door and close it in a killer's face like closing a book, and know she'd stay shut out because he'd decided she would. Sloane let him. That was the thing to remember about her, Maya was starting to see. You didn't move Sloane. She let herself be moved, and filed it away, and made you pay for it later.The apartment went quiet. Just Maya's breathing left in it. Too fast. Her heart was going so hard it hurt. She put her back to the counter and worked on getting one clean breath into her and couldn't quite manage it.She could feel the woman still out there. On the other side of the wood. Not gone. Waiting in the hall the way a cat waits at a mouse hole, in no hurry at all."You're bleeding,"

Twelve wolves went quiet the second Maya stepped into the kitchen.Not polite quiet. Not oh-here's-the-houseguest quiet. The other kind. The kind a room goes when the thing it's been talking about walks in wearing borrowed sweats and last night's bruises.They stared. All of them. At her eyes."Morning," Maya said. Her voice came out normal, which surprised her. She wasn't sure why she'd said it at all.Lindy dropped a spoon. It clattered on the tile and nobody looked at it. An old man in the corner muttered something under his breath that sounded a lot like a prayer, and three men she didn't know pushed back their chairs and walked out without a word.Wilder sat at the head of the table with a coffee in his hand. He looked at her. Then he looked at the room."Sit," he said.One word. Everyone sat.Except Maya. She crossed to the counter on legs that didn't feel like hers, took an apple and a heel of bread, and made her hands stop shaking through pure spite. The mark on her neck felt

"On your feet."Two hard knocks came with it, and a voice she didn't know. Not Wilder. Not Lindy. Deep, flat, bored."Alpha wants you in the yard. Before the rest of them wake up and start asking why the human's still breathing."Maya opened the door.The wolf on the other side was built like a fridge and looked about as friendly. Broad, scarred across one forearm, dark hair shaved close. But he wasn't looking at her the way Boone had, like a problem to solve. He was just looking at her, tired, like she was one more thing on a long list of things he had to deal with before he'd earned his coffee."Kade," he said. "I run the Alpha's people. You do what I say when he's not around, and right now he's not around. Yard. Now.""And if I say no?""Then I carry you, and neither of us wants that." A beat. Something almost human moved through his face. "He didn't sleep. Paced the whole east side of the house all night. Whatever you are to him, you're keeping him up." He turned to go. "Ten minut