All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Wren’s POVI read it in the corridor, standing up, wrapped in a blanket, because I refuse to sit down for it.It’s good paper. That’s the first thing. Heavy stock, the same as the note in Ivo’s cottage, with the three crossing lines pressed into the wax, and the handwriting is small and even and belongs to a man who was in no hurry at all.To Wren Thornhollow, also entered as Elske Renhild.The boy carried a message for you and was paid for it in the usual way. He has returned to you complete, which is more courtesy than either of us is owed.You have been unbound. Do not trouble yourself wondering how we know. We have known every hour of your life for nine days, and we knew the moment your mother’s work came off you, because there is a woman in a yard eleven miles north of you who screamed when it happened and would not say why.The first of the month stands. The stone bridge, at noon. Eleven walked out on their own feet, and you walked in, and your Alpha’s mark on the third page.Tw

Wren’s POVRonan walks out of the stone room and doesn’t come back for two hours.Nobody goes after him. Rhys starts to, and Corrin, of all people, puts a hand on his chest and says, “Leave it, lad,” and Rhys, of all people, leaves it.I find him in the west stable at some hour past midnight, sitting on an upturned bucket in the dark with his forearms on his knees, and I sit down on the straw across from him and don’t say anything for a good long while.“Eleven years,” he says eventually.“Yes.”“I put a stone up for her. There’s a stone in the north field with her name cut into it, and I have stood in front of it every spring for eleven years and told her the pack was holding.”“Ronan.”“I told her the pack was holding,” he says, “while she was in a stall.”I don’t tell him it’s not his fault, because he’d hear it as a thing people say. I sit in the straw and let it be as bad as it is.“Say the part you’re not saying,” I tell him.“Which part.”“The part where you’ve been sitting out

Wren’s POVRonan doesn’t sleep, and by breakfast the whole house knows something’s wrong because the Alpha is sitting in the long hall at a table covered in paper, with two candles burned down to nothing and Rhys asleep, sitting up in a chair beside him.I sit down opposite and look at the sheet he pushes at me.“That’s your writing,” I say.“It’s a very good copy of my writing.”“How good?”“Good enough that I sat here for four hours trying to remember whether I did it,” he says, and there’s something in his voice I don’t like at all. “That’s the point of it, Wren. It isn’t for a court. It’s for me. Somebody wanted an hour in my life where I couldn’t be certain, and they got it, and they got it eight days before I ever knew you existed.”“Who can copy an Alpha’s hand?”“Somebody who’s seen ten thousand documents in it.” He rubs his eyes. “Which is a clerk, or a quartermaster, and both of those are on your shoulder, and neither of them is the answer.”“Why not?”“Because it’s initiale

Ronan’s POVThe tack room smelled of oil and wet leather. Corrin was sitting on the bench with his wrists tied in front of him, and he’d been given water; he looked up when I came in like a man who had been waiting for a coach.“Is he gone?” he said.“He’s gone. Walked out the gate. Nobody touched him.”“Good. That was the right choice.”“Don’t tell me what’s right.”“All right.”I put the copy on the bench beside him. He looked at it for a long moment and didn’t pick it up.“Whose hand is that?” I said.“Yours.”“Corrin.”“It’s your hand, Ronan. Look at the seven.”“I didn’t write it.”“No.”“Then who did?”He breathed out through his nose. “Your father.”The lamp hissed. I stood there and let it go through me.“Say that again.”“Your father wrote your hand better than you do. He taught you to write. He kept the sheets you copied from, all of them, in the cabinet behind his desk, and he could do you at fourteen or you at twenty. He used to do it as a joke at the winter table. He’d si

Ronan’s POV“Then the raid is dead,” Rhys said. “There’s nothing to raid.”“The raid was half of it,” Garrick said. “You’ve lost the half you were good at.”“Shut up.”“He isn’t wrong,” I said.The map was still on the table with my markers on it: twenty men north, four days out, the whole thing I had been building since the twenty-second. I looked at it, and it was a drawing of a place with no one in it.“They knew,” Rhys said. “Someone told them.”“No.” I put my hand flat on the north road. “Nobody told them. They emptied it on the second day of my planning it. They emptied it before I decided anything. That’s worse.”“How is that worse?”“Because they don’t need to know my plan. Any plan I make sends men away from the bridge. That’s what the yard is for. It’s not a prison; it’s a lure, and it has been standing there for thirty years so that whoever holds the paper always has somewhere else to look at.”Garrick laughed, short and ugly, and nobody told him to stop this time.“Congrat