MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR

Chapter 11

Wren’s POV

The man who knows my name comes down to the water like he has all morning to do it.

He’s fifty, maybe. Broad through the shoulders and gone soft over it, gray coming in at the temples, a coat that was expensive about a decade ago. Nothing about him is frightening. That’s the part my body objects to, because everything in me is standing up and screaming and it can’t tell me why.

“Get in the boat,” Maren says behind me.

“You said your mother’s people.”

“I said a lot of things. Get in the boat.”

“Maren.” The man stops six feet from the bank and puts his hands in his pockets. “You look old.”

“I am old.”

“You look it, though. That’s the difference.” He tips his head at me. “Does she know?”

“She knows nothing.”

“You’ve had six years.”

“I’ve had six years of keeping her alive,” Maren says, “which is more than anyone standing on that bank can say.”

They’re talking over my head like I’m furniture. Six years of that, and something in me has evidently run out, because I hear myself say, “Say it again.”

The man looks at me. “Say what again?”

“The name you called me.”

“Elske.”

It goes through me exactly the way it did the first time. Not recognition. Nothing so clean as that. It’s the feeling of finding a door in a wall you’ve leaned against your whole life.

“That isn’t my name.”

“No,” he agrees. “It’s the name your mother gave you before she gave you a better one for hiding in. My sister was very good at hiding. Right up until she wasn’t.” He puts out a hand, and doesn’t come closer, and doesn’t drop it either. “Isen. Your uncle, girl, though I’d not blame you for wanting proof.”

“You’re lying.”

“Probably about something. Not about that.”

I turn to Maren, and Maren won’t look at me, and that’s when the morning goes very cold.

“You knew he’d be here.”

“Wren.”

“You knew he’d be here.” My voice comes out flat and strange. “You told me east. You said don’t stop at the treeline. You put me in a boat with a coat over me and something in my throat that took my legs out from under me, and you brought me here.”

“Yes,” Maren says.

“So this isn’t a rescue.”

“No.”

“It’s a delivery.”

“Yes.”

I’ve been hit in this life. It’s never once felt like this.

“Hear the rest before you decide what I am,” Maren says. “The people who paid me stopped paying. That means they’re coming for you, and I cannot stand between you and them, because I am one tired woman with a bag of dried leaves and they are the kind of thing that owns councils. There is exactly one group of people on this earth with a reason to keep you breathing that isn’t money. It’s the ones who share what’s in your blood.” She jerks her chin at Isen. “So yes. I brought you to them. I’d do it again on a worse morning.”

“You could have asked me.”

Maren goes quiet.

“You could have asked me,” I say again, and my throat closes on it, because I have wanted one thing out loud in six years and it turns out this is it. “Everybody in my life makes the arrangements and then tells me what I am afterward. Garrick did it. You did it. My mother did it, apparently, before she died. Even the Alpha did it, and he thought he was being kind.” I wipe my face with the back of my wrist. “You could have asked me.”

“Would you have come?”

“I don’t know. That’s the whole point of asking.”

Isen laughs. It’s a warm sound, and I hate that it is.

“She’s Alva’s,” he says. “God help us all.”

“Alva.” The name lands in the middle of my chest. “Is that her name? My mother’s real name?”

“Alva Renhild. Youngest of four, worst temper of the lot, and the only one of us who could do it clean.” Isen’s smile fades into something more careful. “Which brings me to the thing you’re going to want to hit me for. That sound you heard. Across the water.”

“It wasn’t a wolf.”

“It was. It’s just been a wolf for eleven years without a single day off, and there’s nothing left in her that remembers how to sound like one.” He nods toward the trees. “She’s ours. She’s the reason I’ve had men watching this crossing for two seasons. And she has spent eleven years bound so deep that nothing wakes her, and no one alive can loosen it.”

“Then what do you want me for?”

“Girl,” Isen says gently, “you cracked a boat with your hand from the far side of a river, and you did it because she called you and your blood answered. What do you think I want you for?”

The pull is still there. Low in the sternum, patient, endless. I’ve been calling it fear all morning, and it isn’t fear at all.

“I can’t do anything,” I say. “I don’t have a wolf. They took it.”

“They buried it. Different thing.” He turns and starts up the bank, and doesn’t look back to see if I follow, which is either respect or the best trick anyone’s played on me yet. “Come and see her. Then say no, if you want to say no. I’ll put you back in the boat myself.”

Maren pushes past me and ties the rope off tighter, and as she straightens she says, very low, without any of her flatness left, “Don’t touch her. Whatever he asks you. Don’t put your hands on that woman.”

“Why?”

“Because I know what your mother’s line does,” Maren says. “And so does he. And he did not mention the part where it goes both ways.”