MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR

Chapter 6

Wren’s POV

I make it to my room before my legs give out.

The door shuts, and my back finds the wall, and then I’m on the floor with my knees pulled up, doing the one thing I have spent six years never doing on purpose.

Remembering.

I know the story. I could recite the story in my sleep. Rain. The east stairs. My mother’s hand. The sound Garrick made when he found me. I know the shape of that night, the way you know the words to a song you have never once chosen to play.

But when I reach past the words, there’s nothing underneath them.

No cold. No smell. No weight of anyone’s hand in mine. Just a flat gray place where the worst night of my life is supposed to be, and the story lying on top of it like a sheet thrown over furniture.

Start with the rain, I tell myself. Everyone remembers rain.

And something moves.

Not a memory. Smaller. A splinter of one. Warm light, gold and low, not the white of the hall lamps. A man’s voice close to my ear, saying two words with patience that turned my stomach inside out.

Hold still.

That’s all. Three seconds of something, and then the gray closes over it again like water over a dropped stone.

I sit there with my mouth open and my heart slamming, because Garrick’s story does not have a man in it.

Garrick’s story has me in it, only me.

The knock is soft. Two taps.

“It’s me,” Talia whispers. “Don’t make me stand out here; the hall’s freezing.”

My hands don’t feel like mine when I open the door. She slides in sideways with half a loaf of bread under her apron and the exact expression of a woman who has been holding news in her teeth for twenty minutes.

“You look terrible,” she says.

“Thank you.”

“I mean it. Sit.” She pushes the bread at me and stays standing, which is how I know it’s bad. “He’s gone.”

“Who’s gone?”

“Your Alpha.”

“He is not my Alpha.”

“Fine. The Alpha.” She drops her voice anyway. “Rode out ten minutes after you came back up. He and that beta with the mouth. Didn’t wait for horses to be brought round, didn’t tell Garrick, just went. Cook says they took the north road.”

The north road goes to the border villages. The north road goes where Thornhollow people go when they’d rather not be Thornhollow people for a night.

Three names, I think. He’s gone after the three names.

“Wren.” Talia was watching my face too closely. “What happened in that room?”

“He asked about my parents.”

“And?”

“And I couldn’t answer him.” I looked up at her. “Talia. What do you remember about that night?”

She goes still. In six years, she has never gone still when I’ve mentioned it, because in six years I have never mentioned it.

“I wasn’t here,” she says carefully. “I came the spring after.”

“Then what were you told?”

“Wren.”

“What were you told?”

Her jaw sets. “That Alpha and his mate were killed in their own house. That the daughter did it in a rage she couldn’t control. That the son covered it up out of love, and the pack let her live out of respect for her mother.” Her throat works. “That’s the story. That’s what everyone in this valley thinks they know.”

“Out of love,” I repeat.

“I didn’t say I believed the love part.”

Something scrapes in the corridor. Not a footstep. A door, thrown hard enough to hit the wall.

“Get behind the door,” Talia says.

There isn’t time.

Garrick comes in without knocking, and he isn’t wearing the good shirt anymore, and he isn’t wearing the charm either. He looks the way he looked the week after the funerals. Hollow around the eyes, moving too fast. That frightens me more than any shouting he has ever done.

“Out,” he says to Talia.

“Alpha, I was only bringing her…”

“Out.”

She goes. She looks back at me from the doorway, and I give her the smallest shake of my head I can manage, because there’s nothing she can do in here except get hurt alongside me.

Then it’s the two of us, and my brother starts taking my room apart.

The shelf first. He sweeps it with his forearm, and my comb and my two hairpins and the tin cup go skittering across the boards. Then the cot. He hauls the mattress off and drops it against the wall and runs his hands over the frame like he thinks I’ve hollowed out the wood.

“Where is it?” he says.

“Where is what?”

“Don’t.” He turns on me. “You were outside my studies tonight. Don’t insult me, Wren. I could smell you on the door.”

“I was walking past.”

“You were listening.” Two strides, and he had my collar in his fist. “He took something off my desk. I want to know what you saw, and I want to know what you told him.”

Here’s the thing about six years. Six years of teaching you the truth costs less than a lie, because a lie has to be maintained, and the truth only has to be survived. I opened my mouth to tell him I saw a ledger, that I didn’t know what was in it, that I told the Alpha nothing at all.

And underneath that, low and completely unfamiliar, something else wakes up.

It starts in my spine. A heat, deep and wrong, like a coal turned over. It runs up into my chest and finds my throat, and it comes out of me before I have any say in it.

A growl.

Not a sound a servant makes. Not a sound I have made since the month they buried my parents. Since the night three people I cannot picture held me down and took my wolf out of me like a splinter out of a palm. It comes up through my teeth and fills the little room, and it is not afraid of my brother.

Garrick lets go.

He steps back. He steps back twice, and his hand comes up between us, and the look on his face is something I will keep for the rest of my life, because it isn’t anger.

It’s terror.

“That’s not possible,” he says.

I can’t answer. My jaw is locked, my whole body humming like a struck wire, and the heat is already sinking, already going out, leaving me shaking and hollow and more frightened than he is.

“It held,” Garrick says, and he isn’t talking to me. “It held for six years. It was done properly. She watched them do it. It held.”

“Garrick.”

“Don’t.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and puts himself back together piece by piece, the way he always does. When he looks at me again, the terror is gone, and something worse has taken its place. Something practical. “Right. That changes the order of things. That’s all.”

“What order?”

“You’ll stay in here.” He’s already at the door. “You’ll eat in here, you’ll sleep in here, and you will not go near that Alpha again.”

“He’ll ask for me.”

“He’ll be told you’re ill.” The key comes out of his pocket. My door has a lock on the outside. It has always had a lock on the outside. “I’m sending for Maren in the morning.”

The name means nothing to me. Nothing at all. And still every hair on my arms lifts at the sound of it.

“Who is Maren?”

Garrick pauses in the doorway, and for one second something almost human crosses his face. Something near grief.

“Someone who owes me a favor,” he says. “Someone very good at making sure things stay buried.”

The door shuts. The key turns.

I stand in the wreck of my room a long time, listening to his footsteps fade, listening to the house settle, listening to my own blood still moving too fast. Then I go to the window, the one too small to climb through, and press my forehead to the cold glass because it’s the only thing in here that feels like outside.

The yard is dark. The treeline is darker.

Garrick is standing at the edge of it with a lantern, and he isn’t alone.

The man beside him is tall and thin and dressed for travel, and he is not one of ours, and he is not Ravencross either. He’s holding a leather case in one hand. He listens while Garrick talks fast and gestures back at the house, and then, without any hurry at all, he lifts his head.

And looks straight up at my window.

At me.

And smiles like a man who has been searching a very long time and has finally been handed exactly what he came for.