All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

Wren’s POVSixty men and nobody breathing.“You’re early,” she said again.“You’re dead,” I said.“No. I was sold. People get those confused.”I got down the aisle between the benches without knowing I’d walked it. Ronan came with me. Teilo and the other three stopped at the door, which was the arrangement, and I could feel them back there like a hand between my shoulders.Close up, she was smaller than the woman in my head. Everyone always is.“Put your sleeve down,” I said.“Why?”“Because there are sixty men in this room looking at a ruled line on a woman’s arm and half of them have paid for one.”She put her sleeve down.“Good girl,” she said.“Don’t.”“Habit.”“Nineteen years is a long habit.”“Eighteen.” She set the pen on the table, very precisely, parallel to the edge. “You were nine in March. I’ve counted it the other way round from you, that’s all.”Ade came up the side of the room and stood at my elbow with her hands still out where people could see them.“Don’t let her get

Wren’s POV“Put it down.”“No.”“Alva, put it down.”“You know I can’t.”Osgar stopped reading at twenty-nine. The room, weirdly, stopped with him. There’s something about an old man breaking off mid-sentence that works better than shouting.“Twenty-nine,” he said. “There are two left.”“Finish them,” I said.“Wren.”“Finish them, Osgar, or all of this is for a room that heard most of a list.”He finished them.Then there was nothing at all in that chamber except sixty men on the floor and the benches, and Dunn face down under Ronan’s knee, and my mother holding a book.“Right,” I said. “Everybody can see her holding it.”“Yes,” Alva said.“That’s what you came for.”“That’s what I came for.”“Five weeks of arranging a room.”“Five months.”“And the whole of it was to be standing there at this exact minute with that in your arms in front of thirty-one houses.”“Yes.”“Say why,” I said. “Out loud, so it’s in Ade’s ears and not just mine, because she’s fourteen and she’s spent five year

Wren’s POVWe went home the slow way, because of Osgar, and because of the boy, and because Katrin was walking somewhere on that road with a day book and none of us would have got past her anyway.We found her at Carrow Ford on the second morning, sitting on a wall eating somebody’s bread.“Well?”“It’s bad,” I said.“Is the child alive?”“Yes.”“Is your mother alive?”“Yes.”“Then it’s not bad, it’s complicated,” Katrin said. “Sit down and tell me the complicated.”I told her. It took two miles. She didn’t say anything until I got to Osgar, took the book off Alva’s arms, and then she stopped in the middle of the road.“He did what?”“He read the standing order.”“The old fool.”“That’s what I said.”“No, you’ll have said something kinder.” She started walking again, faster. “Forty-seven years of looking,g and he makes himself a target in the last week of it. Where is he now?”“Four hundred yards back arguing with Teilo about the horse.”“Good. Let him. Men like that need something sm

Wren’s POV“Absolutely not,” Katrin said.“Katrin.”“I’ve held a door for nineteen years, and I’ve earned one veto,o and this is it.”“Then use it on something else, because the twenty-second’s in eight days and Thornhollow’s forty miles the wrong way and there’s a cart with a real girl on it.”“You don’t know there’s a girl on it.”“There’s always a girl on it,” I said. “That’s the point of the cart. That’s the entire point of every cart.”We did it at the kitchen table at midnight with the whole yard awake because nobody in that house sleeps through a lit kitchen anymore.“Thornhollow’s mine,” I said. “It has to be. It’s a cart and a schedule, and the only thing that turns a cart around is somebody reading the paper back at the driver in the right hand.”“Then take Osgar,” Ronan said.“Osgar goes to Ollan, or he’ll walk there on his own in the dark, and you know it.”The old man didn’t even argue. He was sat with the register in his lap and his hat on indoors, ready, at midnight, li

Wren’s POVYou can ruin a whole day trying to make two true things fit.Here they are. My mother has spent five months forging an office hand to turn carts around. This cart came to Thornhollow on a schedule in my mother’s forgery of Ade’s hand.So either she was sending a woman away, or she was doing something I couldn’t see yet, and I stood in that yard for a long time deciding which of those I was going to believe, because you only get to pick once and then it changes everything you do after.I picked the second one. I want that written down honestly. I picked it because she’s my mother, and I’d have picked it either way, and I got lucky.“Read it properly,” Ronan said. “Not the hand. The words.”“I’ve read the words.”“Read them out to me, because you’ve been staring at the handwriting for ten minutes like a woman reading a love letter.”So I read it out.Standard formula. Thornhollow, the twenty-second, one woman, name, age, and the line about the bond, and the sums, and then the