Marked By My Enemy Alpha

Episode11

Hunter

The moment I stepped into the room, it fell completely silent.

Elias was the first to straighten up, his face a mask of neutrality, but I could see the remnants of something else. Tension in his shoulders, Rosalind’s hand frozen against the cloth she was using on Annalise’s neck, and Annalise herself looking pale and quiet on that narrow cot, her lips still parted as if she were about to finish a thought I had interrupted.

“What,” I said slowly, “is happening in here?”

“Alpha.” Elias’s voice was steady, rehearsed like the tone of a Beta who had honed the skill of sounding calm no matter what was going on inside. “Annalise collapsed in the kitchen due to exhaustion, malnutrition. I brought her to Rosalind.”

That much I already knew. I’d heard Melissa’s shrill complaints echoing through the packhouse, her voice rising as she criticized Elias for overstepping his bounds, for the omega who couldn’t manage a single crate of vegetables. I had come here expecting just that. Exhaustion, a minor issue, easily resolved.

But I hadn’t anticipated the thick silence that hung in the air, heavy enough to suffocate.

“That’s not what made everyone stop talking when I walked in,” I said, my gaze shifting between the three of them. “Try again.”

It was Rosalind who finally broke the silence, placing her clothes down with careful composure.

“We were discussing her condition,” she said. “Nothing more.”

“Rosalind.” My voice dropped to a low, warning tone. “I’ve known you since I was a boy. Don’t lie to me in your own healing room.”

A flicker of something crossed her face. guilt, perhaps, or resignation, but she held my gaze without flinching.

“Some conversations aren’t mine to have with you, Hunter,” she replied. “Not yet.”

“Not yet,” I echoed. “And who decides when ‘yet’ comes? You? Elias?” I shot a glance at him. “Or her?”

Finally, Annalise spoke up, her voice softer than I was used to, lacking the usual fire I expected from her.“It should be me,” she said.

That caught me off guard more than anything else in the room.

“Explain,” I urged.

She shot a glance at Elias, a silent question passing between them. Whatever answer she found seemed to bolster her, because when she turned back to me, her posture had straightened, and a hint of that familiar defiance returned to her shoulders, even though exhaustion still lingered on her face.

“Not here,” she replied. “Not like this. If what they told me is true, it’s not something to discuss standing in a healer’s room with the door wide open.”

Every part of me wanted to press her for answers right then and there, to make her spill the truth regardless of our surroundings or who might be listening. But there was something in her expression…careful and deliberate that made me hesitate.

She wasn’t hiding this from me like Elias and Rosalind had clearly been doing for years. No, she was choosing the time and place to share it.

That was a different approach, one I could respect, even if it rubbed against my dwindling patience.

“Alright,” I said. “My studies. Tonight.”

She nodded once, a silent agreement.

I turned to Elias and Rosalind, both wearing carefully neutral expressions, clearly relieved that the confrontation hadn’t escalated.

“We’ll continue this conversation too,” I told Elias. “Just the two of us. Separately.”

“Understood, Alpha.”

As I left the healing room, I was left with more questions than I had when I entered, my mind racing through every piece of the conversation I’d overheard before I made my presence known. If I was right, and someone had orchestrated that attack… Elias’s voice, low and urgent, cutting off the moment the door creaked open. Rosalind’s stillness. Annalise’s pale complexion.

Whatever was going on, it was far from trivial. As I headed back to my study, I had every intention of digging into the old family records like I had planned before Corwin’s unexpected summons threw me off course. But instead, I found myself veering toward the locked cabinet in the corner, the one I hadn’t dared to open in years.

The key was right where I had stashed it, tucked beneath a loose floorboard that only I knew about. To my surprise, my hands were steadier than I anticipated as I unlocked the cabinet and pulled out the small wooden box inside. It had been untouched since the week after my parents’ funeral, when I had sealed it away, convincing myself I never needed to face it again.

The necklace lay there just as I remembered it. Silver, slightly tarnished with age, adorned with an unfamiliar mark that resembled a mix between a crescent and a claw.

An emblem I had never been able to decipher, no matter how many pack records I pored over during those early, tumultuous years of grief.

For thirteen years, I had told myself it didn’t matter. That whatever the necklace signified, whoever it belonged to, it changed nothing about the devastation Crest haven’s Alpha had wrought upon my family. I had built my entire life around that conviction. I had forged a war from it. Crafted a title, a pack, a reputation for ruthlessness that had kept Silver crest strong and feared for over a decade.

But now, Corwin’s words from the council chamber echoed in my mind, sharper and more unsettling than they had felt at the time.

The debt this family has carried since that night.

I turned the necklace over slowly in my palm, the metal cool against my skin, and for the first time in thirteen years, I allowed myself to truly wonder.

What if I had been wrong?

Just the thought sent a shiver down my spine, a deep sense of betrayal at even considering it, as if questioning the narrative I had built my life around could bring the whole structure crashing down. Every choice I had made since that night…the invasion, the demands I had placed on Annalise, the blood feud that had claimed lives on both sides, everything hinged on the certainty that Crest haven’s Alpha had murdered my parents in cold blood.

If that certainty cracked, what remained?

I closed my fist around the necklace and returned it carefully to its box, my jaw tight, my mind refusing to settle.

Whatever Annalise had learned in that healing room, whatever Elias and Rosalind had finally decided to share with her after years of silence, I had a growing, uneasy certainty that it was going to demand I face a truth I had spent thirteen years running from.

I sat behind my desk and waited for evening to come, the necklace’s box placed deliberately at the center of the desk where she’d see it the moment she walked through the door.

When the knock finally came, soft and hesitant, so unlike her usual sharp confidence, I found myself bracing for it in a way I hadn’t braced for anything in years.

“Come in,” I said.

The door opened, and Annalise stepped inside, her eyes finding the small wooden box on my desk immediately, her face going carefully still.

“You already know,” she said quietly. “Don’t you?"About the necklace.”

“I know it exists,” I said. “I don’t know what it means. I’ve spent thirteen years telling myself it doesn’t matter.” I met her eyes steadily. “Tell me why it does.”

She closed the door behind her, crossed the room slowly, and took the seat across from my desk without waiting for an invitation.

“Because I don’t think my father killed your parents,” she said. “And I think whoever really did it is still out there, watching both our packs destroy each other over a lie.”