All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

Wren’s POVThey came for him on the nineteenth, which was earlier than Nell said, and she was pleased about that in her way. She said it meant somebody was frightened.I was in the hall when the rider came up the yard, and I remember all of it, which I have stopped being surprised by. It has been eleven days since I lost anything I can measure. Ronan writes the book every night and reads it to me every morning, and there has been nothing missing in it since the eighth, and neither of us says anything about that, because saying it feels like putting a hand on a horse that has just stopped shying.The rider was a boy of about sixteen on a good horse, and he came up the yard alone with no weapon and both hands where we could see them, which everybody in this business does now, and I have started to find it sinister rather than reassuring.“I am to give this to the Alpha and nobody else,” he said.“Then give it to him. He is standing there.”Ronan took it. It was one sheet, folded once, u

Ronan’s POV“Say it, then.”“There are twenty houses on your list and four that are not, and every one of them has a keeper,” she said. "Not one of those keepers can read. That is not an accident. It has been the rule since before I was born, because a keeper who can read is a keeper who can be talked to."Every one of them is paid on the ninth and told what to do by a boy reading a letter out loud, and every one of them has been doing it for between six and thirty years, and not one of them knows what he is part of, and not one of them will do anything at all unless he is told."So consider what happens on the eleventh of next month if I stop on the tenth."No letter comes. No money comes. And twenty-four men sit in twenty-four houses with women in the back rooms and no instruction, and no money, and nobody to ask."Some of them will open the doors. Four or five, the decent ones. Some of them will walk away and leave the doors shut, and there is no water in most of those rooms.“And

Ronan’s POVWe had nineteen days, and we did not waste them.The benches sat every morning at eight,t and Sesse drew writs, and Halden argued the hour, and by the second of the month we had opened fourteen of the twenty, and I will put the number in here because it is the only number in this book worth anything.Ninety-one women out. Four dead in the last nine years by the keepers’ own account, all named, all written down, all in the third book with the day and the reason. Two houses empty when we got there with the boards burned, and one keeper who had opened his own doors nine days before we arrived and walked to Ravencross to say so and was sitting in my kitchen every night with a plate.Ninety-one. From here to the east line, in barns and halls and two churches, being fed by people who had not known.And on the fourth, with five houses left on the list and the cart nine days out, Ise came into the hall at six in the morning with the third book open in both arms and put it on the t

Ronan’s POVShe didn’t shout. I’d have preferred shouting.She took the letter out of my hand, held it up, turned it over, and went quiet in a way I’ve only seen her go quiet twice before, both times in council rooms, both times right before somebody lost everything they owned.“Walk with me,” I said.“Is that a confession?”“It’s a walk.”“Because I’ve read a lot of confessions this year and they mostly start with walk with me.”“Wren.”“Fine.”We went up past the long field and over the stile into the birch scrub. She held the letter the whole way, folded, in her fist.“It’s your hand,” she said.“It is.”“Not close to it. It’s yours. The r is yours.”“I know what my own r looks like.”“Then who?”“Somebody who’s seen enough of it to copy it.”“That’s a list of about four people.”“It’s a list of one,” I said. “Maren’s dead hand was left. This is right.”“Osgar.”“Osgar.”“Osgar’s supposed to be dead.”“Osgar’s been supposed to be dead since the fourteenth of last month, and you and

Ronan’s POVIt turned on the seventh, and it turned because a hare went out of the grass on her left.That’s all it ever takes. Every man who’s tried to teach a first turning with a rope and a locked barn has wasted his life. It’s a hare, or a door, or somebody saying your name in the wrong voice.“So you put Cadoc where?” she was saying. “Because if he’s at the top of the lane with a lamp, the driver clocks him at forty feet.”“Unlit.”“A man standing in a hedge at one in the morning holding an unlit lamp is still a man in a hedge.”“Then he stands at the horses’ heads.”“That’s worse, that’s.”Hare.She made the noise. Not a scream, whatever I told her. It’s closer to relief, and it comes out in the last second before a person can’t make noises like that anymore.I went with her. Didn’t decide to. Nine years without slipping, and I lost it in half a second.Then there were two of us in the frost.Smaller than she thinks she is. Bigger than I’d allowed for. Dark along the spine. She