MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR

Chapter 29

Ronan’s POV

“Don’t say it in this room,” I tell him.

“Ronan.”

“She’s four feet away, and she can hear us.” I keep my hand flat under Wren’s chin and don’t move it. “Maren. Can it be copied?”

“It can be read. Whether it stays long enough to copy, I’ve no idea.”

“Then get parchment, get every clerk in this house who can be trusted, and Rhys, that’s your list and not mine, and set them up in the corridor. Not in here. She doesn’t get looked at by six men on a floor.”

“There’s a faster way,” Maren says. “Charcoal and a sheet. You lay it over and take a rubbing.”

“No.”

“Alpha, it’s an hour instead of a night.”

“You’re describing putting your hands on her while she’s like this and taking an impression off her body.” I look up at Maren properly. “No. She hears every word we say in this room. Whatever she remembers of tonight when she comes back, it is not going to be that. Clerks in the corridor. They read what she’ll show them and nothing else.”

Maren opens her mouth, and closes it.

“You’ve changed since the article nine,” she says.

“I’ve had a good teacher.”

It takes six hours.

Wren goes down onto her side against my knee somewhere in the second hour and sleeps as something dropped, and every so often she jerks, and the growl comes back up out of nowhere,e and I put my hand back on the stone and wait it out. Twice she gets up and paces the room end to end, ears flat, and once she stands in the ruined doorway for a long time looking down the corridor at the lamps, and every clerk in that corridor keeps his eyes on his paper as if his life depends on it, which it possibly does.

She doesn’t run. I don’t know what to do with how much that undoes me.

By dawn we have two hundred and eleven names.

Rhys brings the sheets in himself and lays them out on the bench, and neither of us says anything for a while, because it isn’t a list of criminals. That’s the thing. That’s the thing that puts a cold hand round the back of my neck.

It’s a list of ordinary people.

“Four councils,” Rhys says. “Not three. Four. Every one of them has at least two sitting members on here, and the eastern crossing has nine.”

“Read me the packs.”

“You don’t want that.”

“Read me the packs.”

Rhys reads me the packs. It takes a long time. Some of them I expected. A good number of them I have signed border agreements with inside the last five years, and two of them I have called friends in public, and one of them buried a daughter last spring, and I sent a horse.

“And ours,” I say.

“Ours.”

“Say them.”

“Dunn,” Rhys says. “Which we knew. Corrin, which we knew, and he’s down as paid, and Ronan, he’s down for eleven years of sheets and not one single coin; they’ve never paid him a penny. It’s all in the same hand, and the column beside his says the wife, over and over, eleven years of it.”

“Who els?.”

“Two of the border captains.” He hesitates. “And the quartermaster.”

I put both hands on the bench.

“He sat in my hall three days ago,” I say, “and told me we were all guilty of riding past that house.”

“He did.”

“He said it was our crime and not theirs.”

“He said that too,” Rhys says, “and it was the truest thing anybody said in that room, and I’ve been chewing on why a man says a thing like that out loud.” He taps the sheet. “It’s because he knew this list existed. He didn’t know where. But he’s had eleven years to think about what happens when it surfaces, and a man who’s been getting his confession ready that long can make it sound like a conscience.”

“How many of the twelve at that council?”

“Four.”

“Four out of twelve.”

“Ronan, that’s the good news,” Rhys says. “Look at me. Four out of twelve means eight of them are clean. That’s a majority. That is the first thing in this entire fortnight that has gone our way, and I need you to see it before you do the thing you’re about to do.”

“What am I about to do?”

“You’re about to burn your own house down,” he says. “You’ve got that face. You’re going to walk out of here and arrest twelve people by lunchtime, and by tomorrow every pack from here to the coast knows Ravencross has a list, and then Ronan, then, the first of the month happens with them knowing exactly what we know.”

He’s right.

I hate that he’s right roughly every second day at the moment.

“Then we sit on it,” I say.

“We sit on it.”

“For nine days. And we let the quartermaster pour my wine at council on the sixth.”

“That’s the one,” Rhys says. “That’s the man I’ve followed for fifteen years.”

Behind me, there’s a sound on the stone.

Not a wolf.

It’s a woman’s voice, cracked open and barely working, and it says one word.

“Ronan.”

I turn round.

Wren is sitting up against the far wall with the wrecked dress held round her and her hair stuck to her face and her eyes entirely, unmistakably her own, and she is looking at the sheets on the bench, and then at me, and then at her own bare shoulder where two hundred and eleven names are fading out of her skin like frost off a window.

“How much did you hear?” I say.

“All of it,” she says.