MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR

Chapter 9

Ronan’s POV

We come down the valley road on a flat run, and I know before we clear the gate that I’m already too late for something.

The Thornhollow house has too many lights on for the hour. Wrong lights, too. Not the front hall where a man greets an Alpha, but the back, the kitchen wing, the servants’ end, all of it burning at once like somebody’s been searching room to room.

“That’s not a house waking up,” Rhys says. “That’s a house missing something.”

Garrick’s guard meets us in the yard. Four of them, spread wide enough to be a line, which is a decision somebody made on purpose.

“Alpha Blackwood.” The one in front has the sense to keep his hands visible. “Alpha Thornhollow asks that you wait in the parlor. He’ll come to you when he’s able.”

“Move.”

“Alpha, I’ve been told…”

“You’ve been told to stand in front of me,” I say. “You’ve done it. Nobody’s going to say you didn’t. Move.”

He moves.

Rhys makes a sound behind me that’s half laugh and half warning, and then we’re inside, and the smell of the place hits me all wrong.

Fear. Not the usual thin layer this house wears like paint, but fresh, sharp, four or five people’s worth, and running underneath it is something that has no business in a packed house at all. Cold metal. Chemical. The particular smell of a room that’s been scrubbed on purpose.

And under that, faint and going fainter, her.

“East,” I say. “The east passage. Now.”

The corridor to the servants’ wing is narrow enough that Rhys has to come behind me. The third door on the left is standing open, and I know it’s hers before I reach it, because the whole doorway is soaked in six years of her.

The room is a wreck. Mattress against the wall, shelf swept bare, a tin cup on its side under the window.

She isn’t in it.

“Ronan.”

Rhys is crouched by the bed frame with two fingers on the boards. He holds them up, and there’s a smear of something dark and tacky on the tips.

“Not much,” he says. “Not enough to worry. But it’s fresh.”

“Whose?”

“Not hers.” He wipes his fingers, sniffs, grimaces. “Older. A woman and she’s been handling herbs so long they're in her skin.”

Maren, I think. The binder.

“Alpha Blackwood.”

Garrick is in the corridor behind us with his shirt half tucked and his hair wrong and no charm on him anywhere, and for the first time since I walked into his territory I’m looking at a man telling me the truth by accident.

He’s terrified. And it isn’t of me.

“You’re inside my house without invitation,” he says.

“You’ve had a man here tonight who isn’t pack.”

“That’s my business.”

“You opened the east passage.”

Garrick’s head comes up. “Who told you that?”

“You had a binder in that room this morning,” I say, walking at him, and he backs up the way men like him always back up, one step at a time while telling themselves it’s dignified. “You had her locked in. And now she’s gone, and so is the binder, and so is your visitor, and you’re standing in a corridor at dawn looking like a man who’s just realized he’s been holding the wrong end of something for six years.”

“Get out of my house.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know.” It comes out of him cracked and fast and completely honest, and he hears it himself and his face crumples with it. “I don’t know. She’s not in the passage, she’s not in the yard, and neither is he, and he wasn’t supposed to take her; he was only supposed to look at her. That was the arrangement; that was the whole arrangement…”

“Arrangement with who?”

“You don’t understand what they are.”

“Then explain it.”

“You can’t fight it, Blackwood.” Garrick laughs, and there’s nothing in it. “You think you’re the biggest thing in this valley. You are. That’s the joke. You’re the biggest thing in this valley, and they don’t even live in valleys. They have people in three councils. They have people in yours.”

Rhys goes very still at that.

“Name them,” I say.

“I don’t know their names!” Garrick shouts it. “Do you think men like that give you a name? They gave me a schedule. They gave me a number every month and a boy who collected the ledger sheets and a promise that if the numbers kept coming, my sister stayed breathing and my pack stayed mine. Six years. Six years and it was working, it was working, and then you walked in here and stood in my hall and put your nose in the air like a dog at a door, and now they’ve moved.”

And there it is. All of it. The whole ugly shape of the last six years, handed to me by a coward at dawn because he’s finally more frightened of them than he is of me.

“You sold her,” I say.

“I saved her.”

“You buried her alive and called it saving.”

“She killed our parents!” Garrick’s voice tears on it. Then something goes out of his face, all at once, and he says, much quieter, “That’s the story.”

“Say the rest.”

“No.”

“Garrick.”

“She didn’t kill them,” he says.

The corridor is very quiet.

“He did. The tall one. I came in, and he was standing over our mother with a knife in his hand, and Wren was on the floor behind him with her wolf half out of her and no idea where she was, and he looked at me, and he asked me one question.” Garrick’s hands are shaking so hard he presses them flat against the wall. “He asked me whether I’d like to be Alpha.”

I don’t hit him. I want to. There’s a version of the next four seconds where I put him through the plaster, and it would be the easiest thing I’ve ever done.

“And you said yes,” I say.

“I said yes.”

Rhys’s voice comes from the end of the corridor, tight and strange. “Ronan.”

He’s at the passage door with it wide open and the gray morning coming through. On the flagstone step, weighted under a river stone with a hole worn through the middle, there’s a folded sheet of expensive paper.

I know the seal before I’m close enough to read it. Three lines, crossing at a single point.

Inside, four lines, no signature.

The arrangement is concluded. The property has been recovered. Not inquire, and your pack will be permitted to continue. Inquire, and it will not.

And underneath, in different ink, added after, in handwriting I have never seen before but recognize instantly as belonging to a man who smiles while he writes.

Alpha Blackwood. You noticed her one afternoon. We have been looking for eleven years. Ask yourself how you knew.