MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR

Chapter 16

Wren’s POV

Ronan is out the kitchen door before I’ve got my chair pushed back, and I go after him, because I’ve spent six years watching men make decisions about my life through doorways, and I am not doing it again.

The rider comes into the yard and swings down badly, the way you dismount when you’ve been in the saddle since dark. He’s fifty or thereabouts. Heavy through the shoulders. Grey stubble, and a scar cutting up through his left eyebrow, and when he pulls his glove off with his teeth,h I see the ring finger is short at the top joint.

Nell described him in the dark of a cellar eleven years after the fact, and she got him right down to the hand.

“Ronan,” he says.

“Don’t.”

“Lad, listen to me.”

“Don’t call me that either.”

The Ravencross men come round the yard in a loosening, ng and Corrin doesn’t even look at them. He looks at Ronan, and then, deliberately, past him, at me.

“That’s her, then,” he says.

“Rhys,” Ronan says. “Take his blade.”

“I gave it up at the water. Ask your boy on the bank.” Corrin holds his empty hands out. “I’ve come to you. On my own, in daylight, with nobody behind me. Give me credit for that much.”

“You drove a cart.”

The yard goes quiet.

“Eleven years ago you drove a cart out of my mother’s valley,” Ronan says. “With her in it. Alive.”

Corrin closes his eyes.

“Aye,” he says.

I have never heard a man hand over his whole life in one syllable before. It doesn’t sound like anything. That’s the part that gets me. It sounds like a man agreeing about the weather.

“Say it out loud,” Ronan says.

“I drove the cart.”

“She was breathing.”

“She was breathing when I set her down at the eastern crossing,” Corrin says. “She was breathing when they took the cart on. And she was breathing when I came back and told you she’d died in the yard, and sat up with you three nights while you wouldn’t eat.”

Ronan hits him.

It’s fast, and it’s short,t and Corrin goes down onto one knee in the mud and doesn’t lift a hand to guard, and nobody in that yard moves, and I hear myself say, “Alpha.”

Ronan stops with his fist half back.

“Not because he doesn’t deserve it,” I say. “Because he’s the only person here who knows anything, and you’ll knock it loose somewhere neither of us can reach.”

Rhys, very quietly, from behind me: “She’s right.”

Ronan steps away. He does it the way you’d pull a door shut against wind. Whole body, jaw locked.

“Talk,” he says.

Corrin stays on his knee. Blood coming from his mouth. He doesn’t wipe it.

“Eleven years, they’ve had her.”

“Had her.”

“Alive. That was the arrangement, and I made it, and I’ve kept it every month since.” Corrin’s voice is flat and worn, like something he’s said to himself so many times it’s gone smooth. “They’d have killed her in that yard, Ronan. They were going to burn the east wing with her inside it and be gone by dawn, and I stood in that hall with a knife I couldn’t win with, and a man asked me one question.”

“What question?n.”

“Whether I’d rather have her alive somewhere I couldn’t reach, or dead where I could.”

Ronan says nothing.

“I said alive.” Corrin finally lifts his head. “So they took her, and the price was a sheet of paper on the ninth of every month for the rest of my life. Where you’d be. Who you were meeting. What you were buying and from whom. Never anything that got a man killed. I’ll have that understood. I never once gave them a name that put a Ravencross man in the ground.”

“You gave them my schedule,” Ronan says.

“I gave them your schedule.”

“You moved it.”

And here Corrin hesitates. First time.

“No,” he says. “That one wasn’t me.”

“You drew the itinerary.”

“I drew it for next week, same as they were told. Somebody put you in that house eight days early, and it wasn’t my hand, and the moment I saw the change, I rode a day and a half to reach you. That’s the truth if I never tell another.”

Ronan and Rhys look at each other, and something passes between them I can’t read but can feel in the air like weather.

“Then who?” Rhys says.

“That’s what I’ve come to say.” Corrin gets up slowly, an old man’s knees. “There’s somebody above me. There’s always been somebody above me, because a quartermaster’s clerk cannot move an Alpha’s calendar. I couldn’t have done it if I’d wanted to. Somebody in your own house wanted you standing in Garrick Thornhollow’s hallway on that exact morning.”

“Why?”

“To see if you’d stop,” Corrin says.

The pull in my chest goes cold and small. Every man in the yard turns to look at me, and I would give a great deal to be back behind a stairwell rail with a rag in my hand.

“They knew what I was,” I say. “Before he ever came.”

“They’ve known two years. They only wanted proof it sits in the blood and not in the paperwork.” Corrin’s mouth twists. “And there’s no proof like an Alpha with his mother’s nose stopping dead in a hallway in front of thirty witnesses. Congratulations, girl. You’ve been a test since spring.”

“Don’t call me girl.”

“Wren,” Ronan says, and his voice has dropped low. “Go inside.”

“No.”

“Wren.”

“I said no.” My hands are shaking,g so I put them behind my back. “You want the rest of it without me in the room because you think that’s kinder. It isn’t kinder. It’s only quieter for you.”

Corrin laughs, wet and awful.

“She’s Alva’s,” he says.

“You knew my mother?”

“I knew of her. Everyone in this trade knew of her.” He turns back to Ronan. “One more thing, and then you can do as you like with me. I’ll not argue the verdict.”

“Say it.”

“They’ve moved on the Thornhollow house. I came through the valley at first light. No smoke in the kitchen wing, a cart track in the east yard that wasn’t there yesterday, and the front door standing wide.”

I stop breathing.

“Talia,” I say.

“I don’t know names.”

“A kitchen girl. Twenty. Human-raised. She sent you a boy up the north road.”

Corrin looks at me, and something in his face gives way.

“There was a boy,” he says slowly. “Sixteen or so. He was lying in that yard, and he was not lying the way a sleeping lad lies.”