All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Wren’s POV“Four minutes,” Katrin said. “Take the page.”“No.”“Girl.”“You have had thirty years to think about this, and I have had four minutes.” I kept my hands where they were, folded, because if I put one out,t I was going to take it. “I am not signing something I have not read.”“There is nothing in it but a closing. Two lines and a place for a mark.”“Then it will cost me twenty seconds.” I put my hand out after all. “Give it here.”She gave it to me. The paper had gone soft as cloth from years inside a coat, and it opened along creases that had been folded and refolded so many times that the ink had worn through at the corners. Ronan came in at my shoulder and read over my arm without touching me. Rhys had turned himself side on to the hedge with his weight forward and his hand where it needed to be. Nobody on that bridge breathed for a while, and the river went on underneath us as though none of us were standing there at all.It was two lines. She had not lied about that.“

Wren’s POVHe got down off his horse the way a man arrives at a wedding he is paying for.He was sixty at least, and heavy through the shoulders and gone soft at the middle, and he had a scar through the socket of his left eye that had healed to a white seam with nothing behind it. I had heard him described twice, once by Nell with a blanket over her knees, and once by Isen in his own kitchen, and both times by somebody afraid, and I had built something much taller in my head. He was shorter than Ronan. He had bad teeth and a good coat. That was all.“You drove a cart,” I said. “Eleven years ago, out of a yard behind Thornhollow, in the dark. Nell counted you going out, and she counted you coming back.”He thought about it properly before he answered, which I had not expected.“Nell,” he said. “Stall one. She had a good voice.”“She still has it.”“Then that is a mercy, and I mean that.” He looked round the bridge without hurrying, at Rhys, at Isen, at Ronan, at the nine riders he had

Wren’s POV“He is dead,” Ronan said.“I know what I saw.”“Nine years, Wren. I put him in the ground myself. I carried the end of the box, and I stood there while they filled it in,n and my mother was not there because she was in a stall, which I did not know, and I have thought about that funeral every week since.”“Then somebody has been writing in his hand since he went into the ground.” I got my knees back under me. Everything under my ribs felt like a wet rope being pulled slowly through a ring. “And there is only one man still breathing who was ever taught to do that.”“Corrin.”“Corrin is in your tack room.”“Corrin has been in my tack room for thirty-one days with a man outside the door, and the register updated on the ninth of last month.” He said it slowly, working it out as he said it. “So it is not Corrin either.”Dunn had not moved from where he was standing. He had put the box down on the flat of the parapet, and I do not believe he decided to do that. His hands had simp

Ronan’s POV“Who taught my father to write?”Corrin looked up from the bench. Thirty-one days in that tack room and he had stopped asking for anything at all, which I found harder to be in the room with than the shouting had been.“The clerk of the house.”“Give me a name.”“There is not one. That is not me being clever with you, Ronan; there is genuinely no name to give. There is a chair in an archive, and whoever is sitting in it is the clerk of the house.”“Ravencross has an archivist. Had one.”“Osgar. Yes.”“And before Osgar?”“His master, and before her, hers.” He shifted his wrists in the tie. “It is not a man; it is a post. They take a child, usually one that nobody will ever come looking for, and they spend nine years teaching him one hand. Not his own hand. The house hand. By the time he is grown, he cannot write any other way, and every instrument he draws for the rest of his life looks exactly like every instrument drawn in that chair for two hundred years.”“So the hand o

Ronan’s POVHe stood up when I came through the archive door, and he brushed his hands down the front of his coat like a man about to be introduced to somebody’s mother.“Alpha Blackwood,” he said. “My name is Aled. I have been keeping the room.”He was young. Twenty-two, perhaps less. There was ink worked into the knuckles of his right hand the way tar works into a fisherman’s, and the room behind him was the cleanest I have seen it in my life, every shelf faced, every roll tied, and a ladder put away instead of left leaning.“You have been copying my house.”“I have been indexing it. There is a difference, and it matters.” He said it without any heat at all. “Nineteen years of Osgar and not one index in the room. I have done the deeds, the musters, the tithe rolls and about half of the correspondence.”“And sending it out by cart.”“On the ninth. That is the schedule.” He blinked at me. “That is how it has always gone out. I do not set the schedule, Alpha. I fill the crate, and I se