MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR

Chapter 17

Ronan’s POV

I put Corrin in the tack room because it’s the only door on this property with a bolt that isn’t the cellar’s, and the cellar has Nell in it.

It’s a fair measure of how far today has gone sideways that I’ve got my oldest friend penned in with the harness while a woman who slept eleven years lies awake below the kitchen, and I can’t decide which of those two things I believe less.

Rhys follows me into the yard.

“You’re not going to kill him,” he says.

“Not today.”

“That’s not the same as no.”

“It isn’t.”

“Ronan.” He gets in front of me. “One thing, then I’ll shut up. He’s fed them eleven years, and he did it because they had her. And this morning you signed a paper to keep somebody safe by making her yours whether she likes it or not.” He holds my eye. “Different scale. Same animal.”

“Say the rest.”

“That’s the rest.”

“Good. We ride in an hour.”

“Where?”

“Thornhollow.”

“With respect, that’s exactly what they want.”

“I’m aware.”

“No, listen to it.” He drops his voice. “You’ve just had it from Corrin’s own mouth. They spent a season building a test to see whether you’d notice her, and you passed it standing up. Now there’s a cart track in the east yard, an open door, and a dead lad laid out where any rider would see him. That’s not a raid, Ronan. That’s a note.”

He’s right, and I haven’t the temperament for him being right today.

“Then it’s a note I’m answering.”

“It’s a note with a hook in it.”

“Alpha.”

Wren’s in the doorway with Maren behind her. She’s put a coat on over the dress she’s been in for two days, and she’s holding it shut with both fists, like the day’s got colder.

“How far to the Thornhollow house from here?” she says.

“Four hours, hard.”

“Then I’m coming.”

“No,” I say.

“That’s the whole of your answer?”

“That’s the whole of it. They have spent a season building a machine designed to end with you in a cart, and you want to walk into the one house on this earth they know how to find you in.”

“I want to walk into the house where my friend is.”

“Your friend may already be in that cart.”

I hear how it lands. I watch it land. And there’s a piece of me, the piece Rhys has been prodding at since dawn, that notes I had four gentler ways to say it and chose none of them.

“Then I’ll know,” Wren says. Her voice doesn’t break. “I have spent six years not being told things because everyone around me decided the knowing would upset me, and it has not once made a single thing better.”

“That isn’t why I’m saying no.”

“I know why you’re saying no.”

“Then you know I’m not moving.”

“Wren,” Maren says quietly. “The Alpha’s right, and it costs me something to say it.”

Wren looks between us a moment. Then she does the thing I don’t expect at all.

She nods.

“All right,” she says.

“All right?”

“I said all right.” She steps back into the doorway. “I won’t stand in your yard and argue in front of your men. But you’re going to come back and tell me every part of it, including the parts you think I can’t hold. And if I find out later you kept something back to spare me, I’ll know exactly what kind of house I’ve come to.”

She goes inside. The door doesn’t slam. Somehow that’s worse.

Rhys blows out a breath.

“Better negotiator than her brother,” he says.

“Get the horses. Three men with us. The rest hold here.”

“Eight on the yard.”

“Eight on the yard, and Isen, and Maren, and none of them go near the water.”

We’re mounted inside twenty minutes, and I make the crossing in good time, and it’s on the Thornhollow side, half a mile up the road, that we find the first thing.

A cart, off the verge in the reeds. One wheel broken, the whole of it tipped.

“Ours?” Rhys says.

“Thornhollow. That’s their yard mark burned in the board.”

I come down off the horse. There’s a rag caught on the splintered rail. Torn apron corner, and it’s been in the water, and it still carries her, faint and fading. Not Wren. Close to Wren, the way a house smells of everyone living in it.

The kitchen girl.

“Rhys.”

“I see it.”

Underneath the tipped bed of the cart, scratched into wet wood with something small and sharp, in letters that get worse as they go because whoever cut them was working fast and most likely lying on her back, there are three words.

THEY WANT HER

And beneath that, half a word, stopped in the middle.

RAVEN

“Send two on to the house,” I say. “Turn over the study, the desk, every drawer in it, and bring me anything with a seal. Don’t stay past dark.”

“And us?”

I’m about to answer when the sound reaches us from the road behind. Back down the way we came. Back from the crossing.

A horn. Two long notes and a short.

Rhys’s face empties.

“That’s ours,” he says. “That’s a Ravencross muster call. That’s from our side of the water.”

“They never came for Thornhollow at all,” I say.

And I’m already back in the saddle and turning, because the girl I left in that house has one binder, one bruised uncle, eight of my men and a bolted tack room between her and the reeds, and I am on the wrong side of four hours of road.