All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Wren's POVNobody moves for a second that stretches out too long.My wrist is throbbing where Garrick grabbed it; a fresh ache lay right over the old one, and I keep my arm pinned to my side like if I don't look at it, nobody else will either. It doesn't work. Alpha Blackwood's eyes are still on it.Garrick recovers faster than I expect, because Garrick always recovers fast. It's the one skill servitude never managed to take from him. "Forgive me, Alpha. I forget myself sometimes with the staff. It's difficult, keeping order in a house like this." He laughs, thin and brittle. "Wren, apologize to the Alpha for the disruption.""I'm not the one who needs to apologize," Alpha Blackwood says, and something in his voice makes the whole hallway go quiet again.I should go. Every instinct I've built over six years says go, now, before he decides you're worth his attention for one more second. But Alpha Blackwood hasn't looked away from me, and I can't make my feet cooperate with the going pa

Wren's POVI don't work that night.Talia tells me first, breathless, catching me by the elbow outside the kitchen before I can pick up the tray I've carried every evening for six years. "Garrick says you're off. Says it came from the Alpha himself.""Off," I repeat, like the word might make more sense the second time. It doesn't."Off. As in not working. As in you can sit down somewhere that isn't a floor." She's grinning, but there's worry underneath it, the same worry she gets whenever something breaks the pattern, because in this house, broken patterns have a way of turning into new kinds of punishment later. "What did you do to him?""Nothing. I didn't even say ten words to him.""Well, he said something to you. I heard it through the study door before Garrick's guard shooed me off. He told Garrick you don't work tonight, like it was a term of the contract." She shakes her head, still grinning, still worried. "Wren, an Alpha does not care whether the help gets a night off. Not un

Wren’s POVI make it to my room before my legs quit on me.The door shuts and my back finds the wall and then I’m on the floor with my knees pulled up, doing the one thing I have spent six years never doing on purpose.Remembering.I know the story. I could recite the story in my sleep. Rain. The east stairs. My mother’s hand. The sound Garrick made when he found me. I know the shape of that night the way you know the words to a song you have never once chosen to play.But when I reach past the words, there’s nothing underneath them.No cold. No smell. No weight of anyone’s hand in mine. Just a flat gray place where the worst night of my life is supposed to be, and the story lying on top of it like a sheet thrown over furniture.Start with the rain, I tell myself. Everyone remembers rain.And something moves.Not a memory. Smaller. A splinter of one. Warm light, gold and low, not the white of the hall lamps. A man’s voice close to my ear, saying two words with a patience that turns m

Wren’s POVThey come for me before the sun does.I hear the key at about the hour when the light starts thinking about it, gray at the edges of the window, everything in the house still. Two sets of footsteps in the corridor. Garrick’s, which I know like my own heartbeat.And another, lighter, that stops outside my door and waits.The lock turns. Garrick doesn’t come in.“Ten minutes,” he says to somebody I can’t see. “Then it’s done, and you’re gone before he’s back.”“It takes as long as it takes.”A woman’s voice. Older than I expected. Flat, tired, with an accent from somewhere further north than this valley has ever cared about.And something in me lurches at the sound of it, hard, the way your foot goes through a stair you thought was solid.I know that voice.I don’t know where from. I don’t know when. But my body knows it, my hands have gone cold, and there’s a taste in my mouth like copper and rain.She comes in and shuts the door behind her.She’s small. That’s the first thi

Wren’s POVI wake up with my cheek against wet wood and no memory of falling asleep, which is becoming a theme in my life that I would very much like to stop.Everything smells like river.“Don’t sit up fast,” Maren says. “You’ll go over the side and I’m not going in after you.”She’s a shape against gray sky, sitting at the back of a flat boat with a pole across her knees. Reeds go past on both sides, taller than she is. My hands are in front of me, not tied, and there’s a wool coat over me that isn’t mine and smells like the herbs in her skin.“What happened.”“You don’t remember.”“No.”“Good,” Maren says. “That’s the dose working. It’ll wear off by tonight and then you’ll wish it hadn’t.”I get myself upright anyway. My head swings once and settles.“Where’s Garrick?”“In his house, I expect, telling a very large man a great many things six years too late.”“Where’s the thin man?”Maren’s pole comes out of the water, drips, goes back in. “Somewhere behind us, and not far enough,