All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Ronan’s POV“He is buried in my ground,” I said. “Under my wall, with a stone over him that I paid for.”“Then we dig him up,” Rhys said.“You said that very quickly.”“I have been saying it in my head since the archive.” He would not sit down. “I found him, Ronan. I went in at seven in the morning, and he was in his bed with his hands on the blanket, and I stood there for a minute,e and then I went and got two men, and we carried him out on the door of his own room, and I never once looked at his face for longer than it takes to be sure a man is dead.”“Nobody looks longer than that.”“That is my point. Nobody ever does.”We went out at first light with four men and lanterns, because I was not going to do that thing in front of a household, and it took until nine to get down to him, and the ground was heavy with all the rain we had off the water.The box was good. That is the part I have not been able to put down since. I paid for a good box for a man who had served nineteen years in

Ronan’s POV“Where is it now?”“Six hours down the east road with two of your own men on it,” Rhys said. “It went at four with the grain, sealed, on the schedule, exactly the way it has gone out on the ninth for thirty years.”“Who sealed it?”“I did,” Aled said. “At two. Before any of that. The pages we wrote were not in it. I would swear to that in front of a council.”“Then he is bluffing,” Rhys said.“He is not bluffing.” Wren had her sleeve down and both hands around a cup she was not drinking from. “He did not say the copy was in the crate. He said we made it in a room he has the address of, in two hands he trained. That is not a threat about a cart. That is him telling us he does not need to steal it.”“Then what does he need?”“Nothing. That is what he has been telling me on my own arm for a day and a half.” She looked up at me. “Ronan, go and talk to your mother.”“I know.”“Now, before I lose the reason why.”Katrin was in the east room with the shutters open and the rain co

Wren’s POV“Whose hand is it, then?” I said.“Bring the lamp closer.”“Answer me first.”“I cannot answer you until I have read it, and I have been reading that hand for fifty years, and I am telling you it is not mine.” He had not moved out of the chair, but he had come forward in it, and his hands had come off the arms. “Blackwood. You can read it. Come and look.”Ronan came and looked over my wrist without touching me, and the lamp shook in Rhys’s hand behind him, and I watched Ronan’s mouth go flat.“It is the house hand,” he said.“It is very like the house hand.”“It is the same seven.”“Everybody trained in that room crosses a seven,” the old man said. “That is the point of us. Look at the g. Look at the tail of the g and tell me what is wrong with it.”“It goes the wrong way,” Ronan said slowly. “It comes back left.”“It comes back left. Two hundred years of that room and not one of us does that, because you cannot rule a column in a hurry with a tail that comes back into the

Wren’s POV“Read it,” I said.“You read it. It is your arm, and you are not a child, and I am not going to be the one who puts it in your ears.”So I turned my wrist into the lamp and read out the line I had stopped on six hours earlier when the hand changed, and it took me three goes.“One hundred and forty-one,” I said. “Alva of Thornhollow. Party conveyed. Consideration, the withdrawal of entry one hundred and nine.”Nobody said anything for a while. Ronan was writing.“Say it in words,” I said.“I went to them in November,r and I offered myself for you.” My mother had her hands flat on her knees now. “I told them I was a trained hand of that room and worth more in a copying house than a girl of sixteen was worth in a kitchen, and I asked them to strike your entry and put mine in its place.”“And they took you.”“They took me, and they did not strike your entry.” She said it without any heat, which was somehow worse than if she had wept. “That was the day I learned the last thing t

Wren’s POV“Read me the day out of the book,” I said.“It is not midnight yet.”“Read it anyway, Ronan, because I want to know how much of it I have got before he starts talking, and I am not going to find that out in front of him.”So he sat on the step in the passage with the ledger on his knee and read the day out to me, from four in the morning at the graveside to Rhys standing in the rain with a paper off a crate lid, and I listened to my own day come back at me in his flat voice with the times against it.“Well?” he said.“There is a man in a coffin with clean hands.”“Yes.”“And a woman who put her hand in a press.”“Yes.”“And a line on my arm that says one hundred and forty-one.” I let my head go back against the wall. “And there is something at about two o’clock this afternoon that I cannot get at, and it has Talia in it, and it is gone.”“You told her to keep the lamps coming and not to ask what any of it was, and she said she had stopped asking things at Thornhollow when s