MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR

Chapter 20

Wren’s POV

Garrick comes to the Ravencross gate nine days later, on foot, in a coat he stole off somebody smaller than him.

I know, because I’m the one standing at the gate when he arrives.

That isn’t an accident. It took four days of arguing and one very bad afternoon in which I told an Alpha in front of his own beta that if he put men between me and my brother again, I’d walk out of his territory on the north road and we could both find out how well his paper held then. Rhys laughed. Ronan didn’t.

But here I am.

Nine days in Ravencross and I’ve learned three things. The house is warm. Nobody has once told me to go and clean something. And every soul in it knows exactly who I am, because a claim filed under article nine gets read aloud in public record, and the woman named in it is the Thornhollow girl who killed her own parents.

They don’t say it to my face. They say it to each other about four feet from my face, which is a skill I recognize, having been furniture for six years.

“Wren,” Garrick says through the bars.

He looks terrible. He’s lost weight he didn’t have to spare; there’s a wound on his neck that somebody dressed badly, and the charm is gone so completely that I can see what was underneath it all along.

Nothing. There was never anything underneath it.

“Sanctuary,” he says. “I’m claiming sanctuary. Tell Blackwood. It’s my right as a pack Alpha under the third…”

“You’re not a pack Alpha. Thornhollow voted you out on the sixth. Ronan sent an observer.”

His mouth opens and closes.

“Then as your brother.”

“That’s the other thing I wanted to ask you about,” I say.

Something shifts in his face.

“Isen says the bloodline runs mother to child,” I say. “Every time, no exceptions. So either it’s in you as well, and they’ve spent six years paying for the wrong sibling, or you and I never had the same mother.” I put my hands on the bars. “And you called me distant family to an Alpha’s face on the very first afternoon, and it came out easier than any other lie you told that day.”

Garrick’s laugh has nothing in it at all.

“You were four,” he says. “I was eleven. My mother was two years in the ground when he brought a northern woman into the house and told the pack she was a widow from the coast.”

“You knew she wasn’t.”

“I knew she had a scar down her back and no people behind her and a name that didn’t check anywhere.” He wipes his mouth. “I loved her, Wren. That’s the part nobody ever wants to hear. I loved her, and she was kind to me, and she still put you first every single day of her life. And when those men came and offered me the house, I had exactly one thought in my head, and it was that it should have been mine to begin with.”

“Say the rest.”

“I have said the rest.”

“You’ve said the shape of it.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “Tell me what you signed.”

And Garrick puts his forehead against the bars.

“It wasn’t for the house,” he says.

“What?”

“The house is what I asked for. It isn’t what they offered.” He looks up, and his eyes are wet, and I want very badly to feel nothing at all. “They offered me a choice. That’s the only thing they ever do. He stood in that hallway with our mother dead behind him,m and he said, the girl comes with us tonight, or the girl stays, and you put your name to a paper saying she comes later, and later is ours to choose.”

The iron is cold under my hands.

“You bought me six years,” I say.

“I bought you six years.”

“In a locked room. On my knees on your floors.”

“Alive,” Garrick says. “You were alive, Wren. Alive and boring and nobody looked at you twice, and it worked. It worked for six years. I’d have kept it working for sixty.”

I don’t answer that. Somewhere behind me on the path I can hear Ronan and Rhys coming down from the house, and I don’t turn round.

“They have Talia,” I say.

“I know.”

“You know.”

“I’ve come from them.” Garrick reaches into the stolen coat and pushes something through the bars at me. Folded, thick. Three pages and a seal. “That’s the conveyance. All of it. Third page, my name. And there is no witness mark on it anywhere, whatever they told you. Our mother never signed a thing.”

I take it. My hands do it without asking me first.

“Why,” I say.

“Because they’ve given me one more choice,” Garrick says, “and this time I’m going to let you make it.”

Ronan’s boots stop on the gravel behind me.

“Garrick,” he says.

“Alpha.” Garrick doesn’t look away from me. “They’ll trade. That’s the message. It’s the whole reason I’m still breathing. The kitchen girl and eleven others walked out of the Long Yard, on their own feet, in daylight, at the stone bridge on the first of the month.”

“For what?” Ronan says.

“For her, walking the other way.”

And my brother, who sold me at sixteen to keep a house, lays his hand flat against the bars beside mine.

“They also said to tell you,” he says, “that your mother is one of the eleven.”