MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR

Chapter 28

Ronan’s POV

The 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, 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,h and the sound she makes is not a warning. A warning has an offer in it. This is the other thing, the one you hear maybe twice in your life, and it means the animal has stopped believing there’s any door out of the room.

I go down on one knee.

“Alpha, don’t.”

“I’m not touching her.”

I go down onto both, and then I sit back on my heels, and I put my hands flat on the floor in front of me where she can see them.

And I look away.

It costs me something I don’t have words for, taking my eyes off a wolf in that state at four feet, and the whole animal in me is howling about it. But I’ve spent twenty-seven years watching what rank does in a room, and every single thing that has been done to this girl was done by someone standing over her.

“Wren Thornhollow,” I say to the floor. “You’re twenty-two years old. You’re in Ravencross, in a stone room under the west wing, and there is nobody in this room who’s going to hold you down.”

Nothing.

“Your mother’s name was Alva Renhild,” I say. “She was alive when you last saw her, and it was not your fault,t and it was never your fault, and you were sixteen, and you did nothing at all except be in the wrong house.”

The growl stops.

“Nobody in this room is going to touch you,” I say. “Not me. Not the binder. If you want out, the door’s already off its hinges, and I’ll tell every man in this house to stand out of your road, and you can run until it’s out of you and come back when you’re ready, or not come back at all.”

Silence. Long enough that I can hear Nell breathing in her chair.

Then something puts its head against my hand.

Not gently. It’s a shove, hard, the way a dog shoves at a gate, and I keep my hand flat on the stone, and I do not close it, and she does it again, and then she leans, and about eighty pounds of shaking wolf puts her whole weight against my forearm and stays there.

“Well,” Maren says quietly. “That’s a great deal better than I’d planned for.”

“How long does she stay like this?”

“Hours. Days. She’s got six years of it to burn.” Maren is dragging herself upright by the wall. “Alpha, I need you to hear the next part while she’s not in a state to hear it with you.”

“Say it.”

“It came up whole.”

“I can see that.”

“No,” Maren says. “You can’t.”

And she comes across the floor with her lamp and holds it up, and I see what she’s looking at.

There’s writing on Wren’s skin.

Under the fur along her flank, going up into the shoulder, where the dress has torn away. Not ink. Not scarring either. It’s raised, and it’s fine, and it is unmistakably lines of script, packed tight in columns, running from her shoulder blade down into her ribs, and it is moving very slightly the way heat moves over a road.

“Names,” Maren says.

“That’s the register.”

“That’s the register.” Her voice is shaking. “Alva didn’t give it to anyone, Alpha. She put it in her daughter. I sewed it in under the working, and I never once knew what it was, and it’s been sitting in that girl for six years waiting for the box to come off.”

I look at it, and my mouth has gone completely dry, because I’ve counted three columns already and I’m nowhere near the end of the first.

“How many?”

“Hundreds,” Maren says.

And from the doorway, from the wrecked frame where the door used to be, Rhys says, in a voice I have never heard out of him in fifteen years:

“Ronan. There’s a name on her shoulder I know.”