All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 151 - Chapter 160

Ronan’s POV“Say the three dates again,” I said. “Slowly, and out loud, so the whole bench hears them.”Enid put the manifest flat on Cadoc’s bench and weighted the corners with two horseshoes.“Ade took the grey book five years ago, at nine years old, out of her aunt’s hands in a room over a fish market in Ollan.”“Five years.”“Five. I was on the stairs. I carried the girl’s bag down myself.”“Next.”“Her aunt’s name is on this manifest, going out of Cawsand, on the sixth crossing of the year before last. Twenty-six months back, near enough.”“And the third.”“Nineteen months ago I sat two nights by a bed in that same room and watched a woman die of a fever and shut her eyes myself, and then I went downstairs and wrote the entry. Holder, deceased, and I ruled the line.” Enid’s hands were flat on the bench either side of that roll. “Three dates. One woman. And they don’t go together in any order you like.”“Then one of them’s wrong,” I said.“None of them’s wrong. I was at all three.

Ronan’s POVI have been through a lot of doors in my life, and I have never been as frightened of one as that.“Nobody goes in but Wren,” Hedrek said.“That’s my judgment to make.”“It’s mine as well, and I’ll tell you why, and then you’ll do as you like.” He had his back to the door and his voice down. “There are thirty-three housemen in this street. If eleven wolves go up those steps at nine at night, then whatever comes out of that room afterwards was taken by force, and every release signed in there is undone by Christmas, and I’ll have to be the one who says so at the quarter, because it’ll be true.”“And if it goes wrong in there?”“Then it goes wrong in front of two witnesses instead of a riot.”“Three,” Enid said.“You’re not a witness, mistress. You’re her pupil, and she put you in Ranneck, and if you’re in that room the first thing she’ll do is talk to you and not to Wren, and Wren’s the only one of us she’s never met.”Wren was already going up the steps.“Wren.”“I heard h

Ronan’s POV“Say it properly,” Wren said. “Nell. Say it slowly.”“Forty-seven women came down those nine steps while I was on the floor of that cellar,” Nell said, “and I cut a mark for every one of them, and I’m the only person alive who knows there were any.”Nobody moved.“How long between?”“Months. Years, once. There were four years where nobody came at all, and I thought I’d been forgotten, and I’d have given my arm for somebody to come, and I have never forgiven myself for that and I never will.”“And where did they go?”“Out. Up the steps and out. Some the same night. One of them was three weeks, and she talked to me the whole three weeks, and then she went up the steps at four in the morning, and I heard a cart.”Wren went down on her heels in front of her, which put her below the old woman’s eye line, and I have watched that woman handle a chamber and a boat master and a man at a gate, and that was the best thing she did all week.“Nell. Have you got the names?”“Thirty-one

Ronan’s POVI had the satchel off that boy before anybody spoke, and I had him inside the door, and Wren had a chair under him, and Katrin had the kettle on, and he sat in the middle of that chamber dripping and ate three quarters of a loaf while five adults read one page.“Read it out,” Wren said.“You read it.”“I’ve read it twice, and my hands aren’t steady,y and I’d like Hedrek to read it, because he’s the only one in this room who’s never lied to me.”Hedrek Pascoe took it and held it to the lamp.“Mistress. You have the manifest, and I have nine signed blanks,s and neither of us can use what we hold. I will trade the one for the other, and I will come to your chamber at eight in the morning and sit in front of your house and answer what I am asked, on one condition, which is that the woman Merryn Vaughan is not in the room and her name is not put in any book tonight. If it is put in a book, I will be in a different county by Thursday, and sixty-one women across the water have fo

Ronan’s POVHe came up those eleven steps like a man going into church, and he stopped at the top and turned round and looked down at the whole street, and then he came in.Forty-four years old. Sandy, going grey, and a good plain coat, and a face you would not look at twice in a market, and that is the whole of why he has been able to do what he has done.He walked up the aisle between forty-one released women and thirty-five houses, and he stopped four feet from the table,e and he put a flat parcel on it.“Nine,” he said. “Count them.”Enid counted them. “Nine blanks. Signed at the bottom.”“Then that’s mine done.” He put his hands behind his back, which I noticed, and so did Talia from the side door, and so did Wren. “Manifest.”“No,” Wren said.“We had a trade.”“You had a condition, and I’ve broken it. Her name’s in the book eleven times as of last night, and it’ll be in it a hundred times by dinner, and I told you that at four in the morning through a boy of eleven who I’d have