MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR

Chapter 7

Ronan’s POV



The first name in the ledger belongs to a house with no smoke coming out of it.

“Nobody’s been here in days,” Rhys says, crouching at the doorstep. He runs two fingers through the ash in the yard fire and holds them up. “Cold through. Maybe a week.”

“Door’s unlocked.”

“Course it is.” He straightens. “You want to tell me what we’re actually doing out here at two in the morning, or am I guessing?”

“Guess.”

“Fine.” He follows me in. “We came for a border contract. You’ve been in that valley eleven hours. You’ve asked me to run down three names off a ledger you stole, which, by the way, is theft from a sitting Alpha in his own territory, and we’re standing in a stranger’s kitchen in the dark. Somewhere in all that there’s a girl.”

“There’s a girl.”

“There it is.”

The house is one room and a loft. Cot in the corner, table, two chairs, a shelf of clay jars with the labels worn off. It’s the kind of poor that’s been managed carefully for a long time, everything mended instead of replaced. And on the table, weighted under a cup, an envelope.

I turn it toward the window to catch what light there is.

No name on it. Just a wax seal, pressed with something that isn’t a pack sigil. Three lines crossing at a single point.

“Rhys.”

He looks at it and goes quiet, which Rhys never does.

“You know it.”

“I’ve seen it,” he says slowly. “Twice. Both times on paperwork that came through the eastern crossing, both times on crates I wasn’t allowed to open.” He glances up. “Ronan. That’s not a pack mark. That’s a company.”

“What company?”

“Nobody who writes their name down.”

I break the seal.

It’s a single sheet, and it isn’t a letter. It’s an instruction, four lines long, and there’s no signature.

Payment is discontinued. The arrangement is concluded. Remove yourself from the valley before the month turns. Do not speak to the Thornhollow.

“Discontinued,” I read out loud.

“That’s a kill order with manners,” Rhys says.

“It’s a warning.”

“Same thing, depending who’s holding the pen.” He takes the sheet, turns it over, holds it up. “No date. But look at the paper. That’s not village stock; that’s expensive. Whoever sent this is not somebody Garrick Thornhollow could afford.”

And there it is, the thing that’s been bothering me since I opened that ledger in his study, sitting up and showing its face.

“He wasn’t paying them,” I say.

“What?”

“Garrick.” I take the sheet back. “The ledger’s in his handwriting, his hand, his ink, and it never misses a month for six years. But it’s a record, Rhys. Not an account. He wasn’t the one paying. He was tracking someone else’s payments.”

Rhys is silent for a second.

“Then who’s paying?”

“Whoever wrote that. And they stopped.” I fold the sheet into my jacket beside the ledger. “Which means either the job’s done, or somebody’s cleaning up.”

“Cleaning up before what?”

“That’s the question.”

We go through the rest of the house fast. Rhys takes the loft, I take the shelf, and it’s under the third jar that I find the second thing that changes the night.

A leather cord. Strung on it, a flat river stone with a hole worn through the middle, and scratched into the face of it, crude, done with a knife by someone in a hurry, the same three crossing lines.

Underneath, folded so many times the creases have gone soft, a scrap of paper with two words on it in a woman’s hand.

Tell Maren.

“Who’s Maren?” Rhys says from the ladder.

“I don’t know yet.”

“You’ve got the face you get before you do something the council writes letters about.”

“Second name,” I say, going for the door. “Where is he?”

“Two hours east, and Ronan, it’s the middle of the night, we’ve got a negotiation at nine, and if Thornhollow wakes up and finds his ledger gone with you outside his boundary line, he has every right under pack law to call it…”

“Theft. I know.”

“Aggression,” Rhys says. “Not theft. Aggression, from a neighboring Alpha, inside contract talks. He can put that in front of the council, and they’ll hear him, and you will lose the border, and then you’ll lose the crossing, and then in about eighteen months you’ll lose men.” He comes down the ladder and stops in front of me, and he isn’t joking anymore. “I’ve followed you into worse for better reasons. Tell me the reason.”

The honest answer is that I don’t have one that would survive being said out loud in a council room.

“Her brother has been recording payments to the three people who bound her wolf,” I say. “For six years. And tonight, one of them got told to leave the valley by somebody with a company seal and money.”

Rhys’s eyebrows go up. “Bound.”

“She was sixteen.”

“Who does that to a sixteen-year-old?”

“That’s what I’m asking.”

He blows out a breath. “And the scent thing? The thing you won’t talk about?”

“Later.”

“That’s what you said at the gate.”

“It’ll still be later at the next gate.”

We’re at the horses when I hear it. Hooves, moving hard, coming up the north road from the direction we came, and no lantern, which means whoever it is knows the road well enough not to need one.

Rhys puts his hand on the hilt at his hip without appearing to.

The rider comes out of the dark and hauls up short, and it isn’t one of mine. It’s a Thornhollow boy, sixteen or seventeen, riding without a saddle and out of breath in the way that means he’s been going for a while and hasn’t dared stop.

“Alpha Blackwood?”

“Speak.”

“Talia sent me. The kitchen girl, sir. She said you’d know the name.”

“I know it.”

“She says come back.” He swallows. “She says Wren’s been locked in and there’s a man come to the house tonight who isn’t from anywhere, and Alpha Garrick’s had the east passage opened, and she says, she says to tell you the words exactly.”

“Then tell me exactly.”

The boy takes a breath.

“She says the binder’s coming in the morning, and once she’s done, there won’t be anything left in Wren for you to smell.”