All Chapters of Marked By The Rogue Alpha: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

MeredithI woke too early, and the first thing waiting for me was his voice.Nothing past the terms.I wasn't crying over it. I want that clear. I lay there dry-eyed and stiff, mostly annoyed that the sentence had any weight at all. The worst of it was that he hadn't even lied. The marriage was a contract. The mark had kept me alive. I'd known both of those things long before he opened his mouth in front of his mother. But he'd said it so fast, like the answer cost him nothing, and somehow that had shoved me back over a line I hadn't known I'd crossed until he put me on the wrong side of it again.And he hadn't stopped there. He'd kept going, kept reaching for the worst possible thing to say, all night. The man could shut down a trade hall with one look and apparently couldn't get through a single sentence to his own mother without stepping on me. Did he think before he spoke at all?I got dressed with more care than the morning needed, because looking rattled would have felt like lo

MeredithThe cold of it reached me before I'd decided how to answer.She hadn't raised her voice. She hadn't stepped closer or done one dramatic thing. But the warmth that had been there a breath ago was just gone, and standing in front of her like that, I finally understood why the whole house had moved differently the moment she came through the gate.For one second I saw Kieran in her.Not the stiff son at the breakfast table or the man who'd looked cornered when she said bride. The other part of him. The part that didn't need to raise anything to make a threat land in your chest.I didn't step back."If I wanted to help Bloodmoon," I said, "I'd have stayed in that pack when Alarick called and asked me to."She waited."I didn't walk out of one house that used me," I said, "to make myself useful to another one. I'm done being a thing people pass around."She looked at me a moment longer. Then the cold eased back out of her face, slow, like a tide going out."Remember you said that,

KieranI was halfway to the vehicles before I realized my hands were on my lips fondling them.I dropped the hand like it had betrayed me. My wolf was still up and pacing and frankly offended, snarling at the back of my skull about the fact that I'd walked away from her, and I couldn't get my hand to forget the curve of her waist or my mouth to forget what she'd said. Kick you so hard you won't father this pack an heir.I caught myself almost smiling at it, in the middle of a border alarm, like a man who'd lost his sense somewhere on that path.I looked up at the sky once on the way to the vans, jaw tight, and wondered whether something over Silverthorn had the worst timing in the world or simply held a personal grudge against me.Then I shoved it down, because the north ridge did not miss a second signal for nothing.---We were moving inside two minutes. I took the lead van with Silas and a small strike team, and the doors were barely shut before he had the report out."North ridge

MeredithI was crossing the hall before I could even think.They had him up between two wolves, his weight hung off their shoulders, the blood gone dark and stiff on his clothes and smoke worked into his hair. His head hung so low that even now, this close, some last desperate part of me tried to make him into someone else. Then the firelight caught the scar by his left eye, and everything in me dropped through the floor.I was almost at him before I'd decided to move.A healer's aide stepped into my path with his hands up. "Luna, we need space here, you can't—""Move."It came out of me low and flat and cold, nothing like my own voice, and the boy went white and stepped aside without another word.People turned. I felt them turn but honestly? I didn't care who saw it.Elara reached us, and she saw him properly then.Whatever had been in her face went out of it all at once. The warmth, the dry amusement, all of it just emptied, and what was left underneath was so still and so cold th

AlarickThe report came in broken, half a sentence at a time, and I sat in the back of the car with the wine going warm and forgotten in my hand.Silverthorn's north ridge. Fire. Gunfire on the ridge road. The pack had sealed its outer routes inside the hour and nobody on the outside knew the shape of it yet.I should have thought about what it meant. Bloodmoon and Silverthorn and the coalition, the borders, what an attack on the Rogue Alpha's ground did to the balance of every territory around it. That was the Alpha's thought, and it should have come first.It didn't come at all."Was she seen?" I said.A pause on the line. "No, Alpha.""Was she hurt?""We don't—" Another pause. "No one's saying. Not because she's clear. Because no one knows yet."That was the part that got its fingers into me. Not she's hurt. Not she's safe. Just nobody knew, and I was three territories away with a glass of wine in my hand.I called her.It rang. Once, twice, the sound of it going out into a room I