All Chapters of Marked, Not Kept: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The truck smelled like wet dog and gun oil.Kade drove. Wilder rode up front with his jaw set and his hands flat on his knees, and Maya sat in the back between two wolves she'd never been introduced to, both of them big enough to block a doorway, neither of them looking at her.Nobody talked for the first ten minutes. The wipers went. The heater rattled. Portland slid past the windows in the last grey of the afternoon, ordinary as anything. A man walking a dog. A kid on a scooter. A woman arguing into her phone outside a Thai place. Maya watched a whole city of people who got to spend today being people. Four days ago she'd been one of them. Four days ago the worst thing in her life was rent. She wanted to put the window down and yell at the woman on the phone that she had no idea, none, how good she had it, standing on a wet sidewalk arguing about nothing while her whole ordinary life just went on happening around her.Four hours till dark."Say it again," Wilder said, without turnin

The room had a drain in the floor.That was the first thing Maya catalogued when the hood came off, and her brain, which had apparently decided to be very calm about all this, offered it up without comment. Concrete floor, sloped. Drain in the middle. Fluorescent tube overhead with a dead moth in it. A chair, bolted down, and she was in it, and her wrists were zip-tied to the arms with something that had a fine silver wire running through the plastic, and every place it touched her skin burned like a cigarette.Rooms with drains in the floor are for things you have to hose down after.She'd cleaned a diner kitchen for six years. She knew exactly what a sloped floor was for, and it wasn't for people.She made herself breathe. Made herself do what she'd always done, since she was nine years old and learning to read a room: count exits, count people, count seconds. It was the only thing her mother ever taught her that stuck, and she'd never once wondered why a woman like that would teach

The needle was the smallest thing in the room and it scared her more than all of it.Dane came across the concrete with it held up, easy, like a man carrying a drink at a party. The vial in his other hand. The cooler open on the table behind him with its lid tipped back."Small pinch," he said.She kept her eyes on the vial. Empty. Small. It held nothing and it was going to hold her."Don't.""You've had blood taken before, Maya. You gave at that drive at the mall. I drove you."He had. He'd waited in the parking lot and bought her a juice after. She'd thought that was love for about eleven months.That was how he did it. Not the shouting. The juice.He crouched. Took her arm in his hand, and his hand was warm and dry and familiar and she wanted to be sick.Then Wilder made a sound.She'd forgotten he could. He'd been so still so long she'd started thinking of him as furniture, as a thing in the room, as the reason all of this was happening instead of a man lying on concrete twelve fe

The car came up the hill at noon.Black, low, clean, and so obviously wrong on that gravel road that half the yard stopped what they were doing to watch it. Nobody drove up here. Nobody who wasn't pack, anyway, and this thing had never had mud on it in its life.Maya knew before the door opened.She knew from the smell that came off it when the window went down. Expensive. Sharp. Nothing else under it at all."Oh, no," she said.Marlowe got out, buttoned his jacket, and looked around the yard like a man visiting a farm he was thinking of buying."Well," he said. "You've all had a week."Boone got there first with his teeth already out. Marlowe didn't so much as flinch. He just held up one hand, and in it was a phone, and on the phone was a photograph, and even from twenty feet away Maya could see enough of it to stop breathing.Wilder. On concrete. Chained.Alive."Taken forty minutes ago," Marlowe said pleasantly. "I have the address, the layout, the shift pattern, the dose they're u

Sloane made the call at eleven forty.Maya stood close enough to hear both sides. Marlowe picked up on the second ring, which told her he'd been sitting with the phone in his hand, which told her everything about how sure he'd been."Acting Alpha," he said. "You're early.""We take the deal.""Say the whole thing."Sloane's jaw went tight. And Maya stood in a cold hall and watched a woman who'd waited eleven years for a crown spend the whole thing in one sentence, out loud, into a phone, in front of thirty people who'd remember it."Cascade signs the compact," Sloane said. "Wilder steps down. Your man sits at our table. We take the deal."There was a pause on the line that was almost decent."You know," Marlowe said, "I expected that to be more enjoyable.""Send the layout.""Sending." Somewhere expensive, a keyboard clicked. "Sloane. One thing, free, because I'm feeling strange about all this. Crane doesn't lose. If you go in there and he works out he can't keep what he's bought, he'