MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR

Chapter 5

Ronan's POV

She doesn't say anything else for a long moment, and I let the silence sit there, because I've learned more from silence in the last hour with this family than I have from a single word out of Garrick's mouth.

She's smaller than I first registered in that hallway, not in height, but in the way she holds herself, folded in, careful, like she's spent years making sure she doesn't take up more room than she's been allotted. It makes me angrier than I expected it to. I've seen fear before. I've seen submissions bred into pack hierarchies for legitimate reasons, seen betas who know their place and keep it because that's how a functioning pack survives. This isn't that. This is something someone did to her, deliberately, over time, and I intend to find out exactly who.

"Who hurt your wrist?" I say. Not a question. I've decided we're past the pretense of questions.

"It doesn't matter."

"It does to me."

She looks up at that, something sharp and startled crossing her face, like she genuinely didn't understand why a stranger would care about a mark on her arm. That, more than anything else tonight, tells me how long it's been since anyone has.

"Garrick," she says finally, so quiet I almost lose it. "He gets impatient. When things don't go the way he wants."

"How often?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters to me." I keep my voice level, keep the anger building under my ribs out of it, because the last thing this girl needs right now is another man's temper filling up the room. "How often, Wren?"

She's quiet for a long moment, weighing something, and I watch her decide, in real time, whether I'm safe enough to tell the truth to. It's a strange thing, being weighed like that. I'm used to people deciding how afraid of me they are. I'm not used to someone deciding whether I've earned honesty.

"Often enough that I stopped counting," she says finally. "It's not, it's not always like this. He's not always like this. Sometimes he's almost kind. It's just. Unpredictable. You learn to watch for it."

"That's not kindness," I say. "That's a pattern designed to keep you afraid enough to stay compliant."

Her jaw tightens. "You don't know anything about my family."

"I know a man who lies about his sister's bruises inside of five minutes of meeting a stranger. I know a man who called you nobody and staff in the same conversation. I know enough." I lean forward, just slightly, careful not to crowd her, because the last thing I want is to become one more large, looming presence she has to brace against. "I want to know about your parents. Not tonight, if tonight's too much. But eventually. Because I don't think they died the way your brother's story says they did."

Something flickers across her face, not denial, not surprise exactly. Something closer to confusion, like I've said something that snags on a thread she didn't know was loose.

"What do you mean," she says slowly, "the way the story says?"

"You don't remember it," I say. It's not a guess. Her face just told me.

"I was sixteen," she says, defensive now, arms crossing over her chest like she can hold the words in by force. "It was six years ago. Of course I remember it."

"Do you remember it," I ask, "or do you remember being told about it?"

She opens her mouth to answer, and nothing comes out.

I watch the realization hit her the way I imagine ice water would, all at once, breath-stealing, the kind of thing that changes the shape of a person's whole face. She's spent six years believing a story about the worst night of her life, and some part of her, right now, in this room, is realizing for the first time that she doesn't actually have a memory to go with it. Just Garrick's version. Just what she was told to believe while she was too young and too shattered to question it.

"I need to think," she says, standing abruptly, and there's real fear in it now, sharper than anything I've seen from her all night. "I need, I should go."

"Wren."

"Please." Her voice cracks on the word, and something in my chest cracks right along with it, unfamiliar and unwelcome, because I did not come to this house tonight expecting to feel anything at all for the family attached to a border contract. "Please don't. Not right now. I can't."

I could stop her. I could press, could pull the whole story out of her tonight with nothing but patience and rank, and some cold, strategic part of me knows that would probably work.

I don't.

"Go," I say instead, gentler than I mean for it to come out. "But Wren, whatever you find when you start asking real questions instead of the ones you've been handed, I want you to know you don't have to find it alone. I'm not leaving this territory until I understand what happened to your family. That includes you."

She looks at me for one long moment, something unreadable in her face, and then she's gone, the door clicking shut behind her.

I stand there for exactly as long as it takes her footsteps to fade down the hall. Then I pull the ledger out of my jacket, the one I lifted off Garrick's desk before I ever came to find her, and I read the three unfamiliar names again in the low light, turning them over, matching dates against a story that's been unraveling since the second I walked through that front door.

For silence.

Somewhere in this house, six years ago, somebody paid three people to make sure a sixteen-year-old girl believed she'd killed her own parents. Somebody's still paying them. And I have a feeling that whatever Garrick Thornhollow is protecting himself from, he's about to learn it can't be bought off anymore.

I fold the ledger back into my jacket, and for the first time since I walked into this house, I'm not thinking about a border contract at all.

Tomorrow isn't soon enough. I'm going to find out exactly who those three names belong to tonight, and God help Garrick Thornhollow if even one of them is still inside pack territory when I do.