MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR

Chapter 22

Ronan’s POV

She stands there with her hand on the back of a chair and waits, and I understand, with a clarity I don’t enjoy, that whatever I say next will determine the next fifty years of my life.

“I want to say a thing first,” she says, “and then you can have your turn.”

“Go on.”

“You didn’t take the offer. I heard you throw twelve people out of your own hall over it.” Her chin is up, but her voice isn’t steady. “I want that written down somewhere, because I’m about to be unkind and I’d rather be fair at the same time.”

“Be unkind.”

“You paused because for a moment it looked easier,” she says. “Not crueler. Easier. And that’s the thing nobody in my life has ever understood about what happened to me. Garrick never woke up one morning and decided to keep his sister on a floor for six years. He decided it in about four seconds, once, in a hallway, because it was the easier of two doors. And then he spent six years finding reasons.”

That goes through me the way the note in my jacket did.

“You’re comparing me to your brother.”

“I’m comparing the four seconds,” she says. “Not the man. If I thought you were him,m I’d be over that wall and up the north road already, and we’d both find out what your paper’s worth.”

“And what stopped you?”

“You threw them out.” Her mouth does something complicated. “Also I’ve got nowhere to go, which I’d like on the record too, because I’m tired of everybody in this house pretending I’m here out of romance.”

“Sit down,” I say.

She looks at the twelve chairs.

“Not at the table,” she says.

So we sit on the hearthstones like a pair of servants, which is the first sensible thing that’s happened in this hall in a decade.

“Here’s my position,” I say. “Plainly, and you can take it apart. I will not trade you. Not for eleven, not for a hundred, and not for my mother, and if that makes me a poor Alpha then the council can have that argument with me for the rest of my life.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t work. Say I put you on that bridge. They walk eleven people out in daylight, they take you north, and inside a month you’re in a room being made to loosen bound wolves for men who sell them, and every one of those wolves you raise goes out of that yard on somebody’s ledger.” I hold her eye. “The eleven come home, and you become the machine that fills the next hundred carts. That’s not eleven for one. That’s eleven for everyone.”

Wren is very still.

“Nobody said that part in the hall,” she says.

“No. They were still on the arithmetic.”

“Say the other reason.”

“There isn’t another reason.”

“Ronan.” She turns her head. “Say the other reason, or the next time you want the truth out of me you can whistle for it.”

Fair. Entirely fair.

“The other reason is that I cannot do it,” I say. “That’s all. It isn’t noble. If you go north in a cart, I will follow that cart, and I will not stop, and I’ll burn every arrangement I have made in ten years of holding this territory together, and I’ll take three hundred people down with me doing it. So the strategic answer and the selfish answer land in the same place, and I’d rather you knew both.”

The fire moves. She doesn’t say anything for a while.

“Then we need a third thing,” she says.

“There isn’t a third thing.”

“There’s always a third thing. That’s the only useful lesson six years on a floor teaches you.” She pulls her knees up. “Everyone in that hall was arguing about the bridge. Fight at the bridge, don’t fight at the bridge, trade at the bridge, ambush the bridge. Twelve people and not one of them asked the actual question.”

“Which is?”

“Why do they want it at a bridge at all?”

I open my mouth to answer and find I don’t have one.

“They own councils,” she says. “They moved your calendar. They’ve had a house standing north of here for eleven years,s and nobody’s looked at it. They could take me off the road any morning, and they’ve had three chances at me already.” She holds up a finger for each. “My room at Garrick’s. The water. Isen’s yard. And every single time, the tall man came within arm’s reach and stopped.”

“You said he wore a glove.”

“He wore a glove, and he still stopped.” Her voice drops. “Ronan, they don’t want to grab me. They want me handed over. Walking. Standing on a bridge with my brother’s paper behind me and an Alpha’s consent on top of it, in daylight, with witnesses.”

And there it is. The thing that’s been sitting wrong since Garrick put his hand on those bars.

“They want it lawful,” I say.

“Why would that matter to men who murder people in yards?”

“Because a deferred conveyance is void on a person,” I say slowly, “unless it’s honored. Unless a pack Alpha stands at a bridge and treats it as good paper in front of witnesses. Then it isn’t a kidnapping. It’s a completed transaction with an Alpha’s mark on it, and every court in three territories that’s been looking away suddenly has a precedent to point at.”

Wren has gone white.

“Then it isn’t about me at all,” she says.

“It’s about me.”

“It’s about the paper.” She’s up on her feet. “Ronan, it’s about the paper. Nell said it. She said it, and none of us understood it. It isn’t the blood they want; it’s the girl. She wasn’t talking about my blood being useless. She was saying they don’t need my blood; they’ve got other ways to move wolves. They’ve had them for years.” Her hands are shaking. “They need one girl, sold legally, with an Alpha’s signature on the delivery. Because after that they can buy anyone.”