All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Wren’s POVThey keep her in a root cellar under a house with no smoke.Isen goes down the steps first with a lamp. Maren comes last, which puts me between them, and I have enough of my wits left to notice that neither of them planned it any other way.The cellar is cold and dry and smells like earth and old apples. Someone has put a real bed down here, and a chair beside it, and a shelf with a cup on it, and all that care makes what’s on the bed worse instead of better.She’s a woman about forty. Small. Grey at the roots and dark at the ends. Her hands are folded on top of a blanket that has been tucked in by someone who does it every day, and her eyes are open, and she is not in the room with us at all.“Nell,” Isen says. “I’ve brought somebody.”Nothing.“Eleven years?” I ask.“Eleven in the spring.”“Does she eat?”“If you put it in her mouth.” He sets the lamp down. “She walks, if you walk her. She sleeps when it’s dark. She’s a body doing the things a body does, and everything el

Wren’s POVI make them argue about it in front of me, which is new.“Absolutely not,” Maren says.“She said run,” Isen says. “Nell surfaced for four seconds after eleven years and she used them on a warning, and you want to sit in this kitchen and wait for morning.”“I want the girl to have a day. One day, Isen. She learned her mother’s name this morning.”“She doesn’t get a day. Nobody’s ever given her one, and I’m not able to be the first.”“Then say the true reason.”“That is the true reason.”“Say the other one.”“Fine.” Isen slaps the table. “The other reason is that my wife spoke this morning and I would sell this entire valley for another four seconds of it. There. Is that ugly enough for you?”“It’ll do,” Maren says.I put my cup down.“I’ll do it,” I say.Both of them start talking at once and I let them go for a moment, because I’ve spent six years being the quietest thing in every room and it turns out there’s a particular pleasure in being the reason people are shouting.“

Wren’s POVRonan is out the kitchen door before I’ve pushed my chair back, and I go after him because I’ve spent six years watching men make decisions about my life through doorways, and I am not doing it again.The rider comes into the yard and swings down badly, the way you dismount when you’ve been in the saddle since dark. He’s fifty or thereabouts. Heavy through the shoulders. Grey stubble, and a scar cutting up through his left eyebrow, and when he pulls his glove off with his teeth, I see the ring finger is short at the top joint.Nell described him in the dark of a cellar eleven years later, and she got him right down to the hand.“Ronan,” he says.“Don’t.”“Lad, listen to me.”“Don’t call me that either.”The Ravencross men come round the yard in a loose ring, and Corrin doesn’t even look at them. He looks at Ronan, and then, deliberately, past him, at me.“That’s her, then,” he says.“Rhys,” Ronan says. “Take his blade.”“I gave it up at the water. Ask your boy on the bank.”

Wren’s POVThe horn goes twice while I’m carrying water down to Nell, and the second time it goes, Maren takes the bucket out of my hands and sets it on the step.“Cellar,” she says.“That’s where Nell is.”“That’s the point. One door, no window, and if it comes to it,t you’ll be the only person in this valley who can get her up those steps.” Maren is already moving. “Isen. Unbolt the tack room.”“You want to let him out?”“I want a man who has spent eleven years wanting his Alpha’s forgiveness standing between us and the water,” Maren says. “He’ll fight harder than both of us, and he knows it.”Isen is already in the yard shouting at the Ravencross men, and the Ravencross men are shouting at one another, and somebody has got the gate closed, which would matter more if the property had a wall.They come out of the reeds.That’s the thing nobody prepares you for. Not the road, not the trees, but the reeds, that flat green nothing along the water that everyone has walked past all mornin

Wren’s POVGarrick comes to the Ravencross gate nine days later, on foot, in a coat he stole off somebody smaller than him.I know, because I’m the one standing at the gate when he arrives.That isn’t an accident. It took four days of arguing and one very bad afternoon in which I told an Alpha in front of his own beta that if he put men between me and my brother again, I’d walk out of his territory on the north road and we could both find out how well his paper held then. Rhys laughed. Ronan didn’t.But here I am.Nine days in Ravencross and I’ve learned three things. The house is warm. Nobody has once told me to go and clean something. And every soul in it knows exactly who I am, because a claim filed under article nine gets read aloud in public record, and the woman named in it is the Thornhollow girl who killed her own parents.They don’t say it to my face. They say it to each other about four feet from my face, which is a skill I recognize, having been furniture for six years.“Wr