All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Ronan’s POVShe stands there with her hand on the back of a chair and waits, and I understand, with a clarity I don’t enjoy, that whatever I say next will determine the next fifty years of my life.“I want to say a thing first,” she says, “and then you can have your turn.”“Go on.”“You didn’t take the offer. I heard you throw twelve people out of your own hall over it.” Her chin is up, but her voice isn’t steady. “I want that written down somewhere, because I’m about to be unkind and I’d rather be fair at the same time.”“Be unkind.”“You paused because for a moment it looked easier,” she says. “Not crueler. Easier. And that’s the thing nobody in my life has ever understood about what happened to me. Garrick never woke up one morning and decided to keep his sister on a floor for six years. He decided it in about four seconds, once, in a hallway, because it was the easier of two doors. And then he spent six years finding reasons.”That goes through me the way the note in my jacket did

Ronan’s POV“No,” I say.“You don’t get a no,” Wren says. “You get an opinion, and you can say it once.”We’re in my study, which is a mistake, because a study is where I win arguments, and this is not going to be one of those. Maren’s by the door. Rhys is at the window pretending to look at the yard. Isen came and had to be sent out again after ten minutes.“Then here’s the opinion,” I say. “Six days ago,o a woman who had been bound for eleven years got up out of a bed, threw a lamp, and hasn’t been able to stand unaided since. You saw what raising her cost you, and that was you reaching into somebody else. Now you’re proposing to unbind yourself, with no training, with a document sewn in underneath it, and the person who put it there tells me she doesn’t know what happens to the paper when the working comes apart.”“That’s true,” Maren says. “I don’t.”“Thank you.”“It may come out whole. It may come out ash. It may come out and she may not, and I’d rather everyone in this room hear

Wren’s POVNell’s window is open, and Nell is still in bed.That’s the first thing. I get up those stairs ahead of everybody because I’m the only one not carrying an injury or a rank, and I go through the door expecting an empty room, and instead she’s propped against the headboard with the cold coming in over her and a look on her face I will remember for a long time.“He’s gone out over the roof,” she says. “Don’t shout at me. I let him.”“Nell.”“I said don’t shout.” She’s shaking. Not from cold. “Shut the window, girl, and sit down, and I’ll tell you what I’ve done.”Ronan comes in behind me, and Maren behind him, and Nell looks at the three of us and laughs, wet and awful.“Eleven years he sat in that chair,” she says. “You’ve none of you any idea what that does to a man. I’ve had one week of watching him, and I’m frightened of him, and I love him, and both those are true.”“What did they offer him?” Ronan says.“A name.” Nell’s hands close on the blanket. “That’s all. Not money.

Ronan’s POVThe room goes white.That’s the only honest way I can put it. Not light. Something else, something that comes off her in a single soundless shove, and it takes the door off its hinges behind me and puts Maren flat on her back against the far wall and drives every candle in the room out at once.Then there’s a wolf in the stone room.She’s small. That’s the first thing I register, and I’m ashamed of it. Small, and dark through the shoulders, grey coming up under her jaw, and she’s standing in the middle of the floor in the wreck of a servant’s dress with her head down and her ears flat,t and she has no idea where she is or what year it is.She doesn’t know me.“Don’t move,” Maren says from the wall. She’s winded. She’s laughing, which is worse. “Alpha. Don’t you move a muscle.”“She’s bleeding.”“That’s the working coming off. Leave it.”Wren’s lips come back off her teeth,th and the sound she makes is not a warning. A warning has an offer in it. This is the other thing, t

Wren’s POVSomebody has put a blanket round me, and somebody has put water in my hand, and I can’t hold the cup, so Ronan holds it,t and I drink out of it, and neither of us mentions that.“Say it again,” I tell him. “The part about the quartermaster.”“Wren.”“I’m not fragile. I’m just naked, and I’ve been a wolf for nine hours.” My voice comes out in pieces. “Say it again.”So he says it again. All of it. Two hundred and eleven names, four councils, nine at the eastern crossing, four out of the twelve who sat in his hall and discussed trading me, and every single one of them still sleeping under his own roof this morning, because arresting them today loses everything.I listen to the whole thing, and I don’t cry, and when he’s finished I say, “Good.”Rhys makes a noise.“Good?”“Nine days ago I was the most valuable object in this territory,” I say. “That’s what your quartermaster called me. And he’s on the list, and he said it in front of eleven people, so that when it all comes apa