All Chapters of Marked By The Rogue Alpha: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

MeredithSera turned back around to face me, and I made myself sit still in the saddle and not look away from her, even though something in me wanted to.Kieran stayed where he was beside his own horse. He didn't step in, and I knew by now that the not-stepping-in was deliberate.The stable boy had found a strap to fuss with. It didn't need fussing with. He worked at it like his life depended on the buckle.I waited. Sera said nothing, and the silence stretched out long enough that I started to feel it crawl up the back of my neck, and I had to fight the urge to fill it for her.Then she looked at me, dead on, with something cold and flat in her eyes that I felt in my chest before I understood it."You want all of us to believe you can't be handled," she said. "That you walked in here and nobody puts a hand on you. But you gave Alarick five years to handle you. Five. So forgive me if I don't bow to the new version overnight."My grip tightened on the reins, and the gelding tossed his

MeredithI crossed the yard with mud drying stiff on my dress and Kieran's no still ringing in my ears."Let him handle it," I muttered, and I dragged the next few steps out of myself like they cost money. "Handle it. Sure. He'll handle it.""Let him handle it," I said again, lower. "Right. Because it's his name they printed. His face they're all losing sleep over." I yanked a clump of mud off my sleeve and flicked it at the dirt. "'Let me handle it, Meredith.' Handle what, exactly? It's mine. The mark's mine, the mess is mine, and somehow the one mouth nobody wants to hear from is also mine." The path from the stables down to the lower yard was busy. Wolves moved through it with feed sacks and patrol gear and baskets of training clothes, and a few of them caught the state of my dress and looked away fast. One younger wolf kept staring a beat too long, until the woman beside him drove an elbow into his ribs."Ow—what was that for?" he hissed at her.She didn't bother answering. She

AlarickI'd wanted the office quiet so I could wait in peace for my own plan to land.Instead my phone lit up with her face.It was a saved clip by the time I found it, the live already over and spreading with the count under it climbing while I watched. Meredith stood in the middle of the frame and spoke straight into the lens, and I sat forward without deciding to.She was angry. Flushed at the cheek, jaw set, the mark plain on her throat where she'd made no effort to cover it."—it has stared at me, it has tested me, and it has annoyed me on a more or less daily basis," she was saying, "but it has not gagged me, and not one wolf here has told me to make myself smaller than I am. Which is more than I can say for the pack that's suddenly so worried about my wellbeing."Under all of it her voice came out level, steadier than it had any right to be, the kind of steady I didn't want to sit with too long because I didn't recognise it on her.The pack that's suddenly so worried about my w

Meredith“Tonight,” I repeated.A man’s mother coming to visit was supposed to be a normal thing. Ordinary. The kind of news you nodded at and asked what time. But Kieran's jaw had gone tight, and his mouth had pressed into a hard line. He was staring at the phone like it had said something he didn't want to read twice. That look put me on edge before I even knew why. I tried to act like it didn't matter. It did. My head was already going somewhere I didn't like, asking what kind of woman Elara Croft was, and worse, what she'd already decided about me. She would have seen the clipped live by now. The welfare complaint sitting against her son's house. A week of posts calling me his puppet. Whatever picture she'd put together from all that, she was bringing it through the door tonight. "Get me Silas," Kieran said to the nearest wolf.The man turned to go, but Kieran had already lifted his phone and was thumbing the call himself. The wolf stopped, unsure whether he was still being se

KieranI followed them into the small receiving room off the inner hall, and I was already irritated before a word had been said.She'd done it again. She'd been inside Silverthorn for ten minutes and the whole house was standing straighter, and I'd backed off a sentence in my own entrance hall because she looked at me. She always did this. I still didn't know how, and I didn't know why she'd come now of all weeks, when every other thing in my life was already on fire.Meredith walked beside her, quiet, her chin level. To anyone else she'd have looked composed. I could see the set of her shoulders, though, drawn up tight, and I knew her well enough by now to read it. She wasn't comfortable. She'd just decided no one in this room was going to catch her looking like it.Elara drew off her gloves one finger at a time, then her travelling coat, in no hurry at all. She knew exactly what the waiting did to me, and she took her time precisely because of it. She didn't sit. She looked the room