Chapter Four

Ivy's Pov

I should have walked away. He was a stranger, bleeding out between two trees at the edge of pack territory, and every sensible thought in my head was telling me that a man this badly injured at the border could be a rogue or a criminal trying to flee but my feet wouldn't move in the other direction.

My wolf was restless inside me, pacing low and quiet, a soft continuous growl that wasn't aggression.

I pulled the small medical kit from my bag. I always carried one when I came here. The path to my mother's grave was uneven and overgrown and I had twisted my ankle on it more than once. I crouched a few feet away from him first, just watching, trying to get a read on how conscious he actually was.

Even with his face half in shadow and with that much blood soaked into his clothes, I could see the shift happen the moment I got close. His body stiffened. One hand pressed harder into the dirt.

His head turned toward me slowly, and through whatever haze of pain and blood loss he was under, he barely looked at me and made a sound low in his throat.

It was a warning. Rough and weak but unmistakably deliberate.

I stayed where I was. "I'm not going to hurt you," I said. "I'm just going to stop the bleeding."

He made the sound again. Deeper this time, and even half-conscious and unable to lift himself off the ground, the force of it went through my chest like a bass note through thin walls. My legs nearly gave out.

I pressed my hand flat against the tree beside me, steadied myself, and kept moving toward him.

"I know," I said, more to myself than to him. "I know….Just stay still."

His presence was overwhelming even like this, not even Noah had such effects and aura. I had lived with an Alpha for five years. I knew what dominance felt like in a room.

I pushed the thought aside and focused on the wound.

It was bad. Deep, like something had torn rather than cut, and he had lost a significant amount of blood before I got to him. I worked quickly, pressing the gauze firm against the worst of it, wrapping what I could reach with the bandaging in the kit, keeping my hands steady through the second low roar that rolled out of him when I applied pressure. This one nearly took me off my knees. I gripped his shirt and held on and kept pressing.

"You're going to be fine," I told him, even though I wasn't certain. "You're too stubborn not to be."

I didn't consider taking him home. I had enough troubles to add to it.

I found the cemetery keeper in his small stone hut at the entrance of the grounds, right where he always was just before dark, wrapping herbs and muttering to himself. Benno. "There's an injured man in the trees past the east path," I said. "He's bad but stable for now. Someone tore into him."

Benno set down his herbs slowly and looked at me. "How bad?"

"He needs shelter and time. Not a hospital, if he wanted a hospital he would have gone to one." I paused. "He has a strong wolf. He'll survive if the bleeding stays stopped."

Benno was quiet for a moment and then stood up without any further questions. He reached for his coat and the worn leather satchel he kept stocked with more knowledge than most pack healers. "I'll check him out."

"Don't tell him I was there," I said. "Don't tell anyone please, I just can't bear to see him bleeding out near my mother's cemetery"

He looked at me with those calm old eyes and smirked. "You were never here."

I walked back to the main road and called Sera for a ride and didn't mention the man in the trees.

***

I woke up the next morning to my phone buzzing on the nightstand.

A group chat notification. Three members. Myself, Mrs. Holt who managed Noah's household, and Amy.

I sat up in bed in Sera's spare room, hair loose around my face, and I stared at it for a moment before I opened it.

Mrs. Holt had sent a message at six in the morning: Miss Amy isn't feeling well this morning. She's been asking about the soup again. Alpha Noah wanted us to reach out.

Then Amy, forty minutes later, with a sad-face emoji: I know it's a lot to ask. I just haven't been able to eat properly. The soup you made last time was the only thing that helped my stomach. But I understand if you don't want to.

I set the phone face down on the mattress and lay there staring at the ceiling.

I knew this game. I had played it before and lost badly.

Eight months ago, I had brought a flask of slow-cooked bone broth to Noah's study because he had been working late and hadn't eaten. He wasn't there when I arrived. Amy was, curled up on the reading chair in one of his sweaters, and she had looked at the flask with such genuine longing that I had, stupidly, told her to help herself. She drank the whole thing in one sitting and looked at me afterward with those soft eyes and said, "I've never had anything like this. You're so talented, Ivy. I wish I could have this every day."

I should have laughed and walked out. Instead I said nothing, and two days later Noah came to me and said Amy's appetite had been suffering because of her illness and that the soup had been the first thing to help and could I make it a few more times. Just a few times. Just until she was stronger.

I said no. I was eight months pregnant. I had my own health to manage, my own body that was running on almost no pheromone support, and I was not going to become a private cook for the woman my husband was in love with.

Amy was admitted to the hospital unconscious that same night.

They pumped her stomach. They called it a crisis episode. Noah called me from the hospital at two in the morning, his voice so cold it had no temperature at all, and said, "She left a note. It says she knows she's not worthy of anyone's kindness. That since she's dying anyway, why should anyone bother." He paused. "She's asking about you specifically, Ivy. I need you to think very carefully about the kind of person you want to be."

She recovered in two days. Sent home bright-eyed and quiet and wearing the expression of someone who had narrowly survived something terrible. The pack found out and I spent a week being looked at in halls and corridors like I was something that had crawled out from under something. Noah didn't come home for eleven days after that. Eleven days with no pheromones, my son growing inside me, my body going into low-grade distress that the doctors said was manageable but concerning.

I held out for as long as I could before my hands started shaking in my sleep and I woke up one night in a cold sweat with my son barely moving inside me.

I called Noah. He picked up on the second ring, which told me everything — he had been waiting for me to break. "Are you ready to apologize?" he said. That was it, Not are you okay or how is the baby. Just are you ready to apologize.

I apologized. I went to Amy's room in Noah's house and I apologized while she sat in bed with a cup of tea and looked at me with something that wasn't quite guilt and wasn't quite satisfaction either, something that existed in the careful space between the two. And then I cooked for her every day for the next eight weeks until the night of the banquet, because my son's life was not something I was willing to gamble with but my son was gone now.

I picked my phone back up.

The group chat was still open. Amy's message sitting there with its sad-face emoji and its perfectly worded helplessness. I understand if you don't want to.

I typed one message, slow and deliberate, and read it back once before I sent it. "You were right back then. You are indeed not worthy."

I pressed send…Then I left the group.

Liam's POV

I had been in worse situations than bleeding out at a pack border with no guards and three broken ribs. At least that was what I kept telling myself as I lay face down in the dirt of Ironveil's territory, the cold ground pressing against my cheek and my blood soaking steadily into the soil beneath me.

Twenty-six packs answered to my name. I commanded the most feared lycan army on the continent. I had walked into war rooms and walked back out while men twice my size didn't. And yet here I was, disguised as a filthy rogue, ambushed at a border I should never have crossed alone, because I had decided that traveling without guards was the intelligent thing to do for a covert investigation.

But it wasn't.

The pain was manageable. No one who knew where I was. I had made sure of that myself, which meant if I died in this particular patch of dirt, it would be entirely my own fault, and I found that more irritating than the three broken ribs.

Then I heard footsteps.

Soft and careful which belonged to someone who had learned to move without drawing attention to themselves. Whoever she was, she smelled like the first fresh dew of air and so fucking sweet like flowers, I heard her stop a few feet away. Assessing until she came closer.

My wolf sent a growl up through my throat before I could think about it, like a kind of warning.

She grabbed my shirt and held on and pressed the gauze harder against my wound.

"You're going to be fine," she said quietly. "You're too stubborn not to be."

I tried to turn my head to see her face but my body had already stopped cooperating. The last thing I registered before the darkness swallowed me completely was the warmth of her hands and the smell of spring in the cold air.

***

I woke up on a narrow cot in a stone hut that smelled like dried herbs and firewood. My jacket had been removed. Someone had wrapped my ribs and cleaned the gash on my back, and whoever had done it knew what they were doing. It's tight, clean and efficient and not the work of someone panicking.

An old man sat across from me at a small wooden table, sorting through bundles of dried herbs like he had all the time left in the world and planned to use it slowly.

"Who brought me here," I said. My voice came out lower and rougher than I expected, scraped raw from however long I had been unconscious.

"I found you myself," the old man said without looking up. "At the border."

I studied him for a moment. My wolf remembered that smell. Flowers... It had not come from this old man. "Try again and don't like to me."

He kept sorting his herbs and said nothing.

I sat up slowly, which cost me considerably, and I let the silence grow until it had enough weight to press on him. I could see it in the small tension around his jaw. He was protecting someone specific.

"Old man," I said. "I am going to ask you one more time. Not because I enjoy asking. Because I want to give you the chance to tell me before I find out another way."

He looked up then he set his herbs down and sighed like a man putting down something he had been carrying too long. "She asked me not to say."

"Who is she?"

"The Luna," he said quietly. "Ironveil's Luna. Her name is Ivy."

I sat with that for a moment. Ironveil's Luna had found a bleeding stranger at the border of her pack's territory, treated his wounds, arranged shelter with a man she trusted, and left without giving her name or asking for a single thing in return. That's interesting,it made something stirred in my chest.

I healed faster than the old man expected. Three days and I was upright. I thanked him briefly, pulled my hood low over my face, and slipped into Ironveil's territory properly for the first time.

My actual mission was the jade key — stolen from my pack's sacred vault, traced to this region, connected to crimes that went back almost two decades. But I needed information before I could move, and the best information was always the kind people gave without knowing they were giving it.

So I listened.

What I found over the next several days settled like a stone in my chest. Ironveil was a genuinely impressive pack — top three in continental rankings, strong external alliances, an internal structure that most Alphas spent entire reigns trying to build. It was the kind of pack that made other Alphas take notice. And every single time I traced the root of anything that worked in this territory, the answer was the same.

Ivy.

She had built all of it. The rankings, the alliances, the diplomatic relationships with outside packs, the internal organization that held everything together at every joint. She had done it quietly while the pack took it as given and her Alpha took credit for existing in the same territory.

The pack spoke about her the way people spoke about infrastructure. She's useful and unremarkable for the Alpha and Pack. The kind of thing you noticed only when it stopped working.

My jaw tightened every time I heard it.

Then I started listening for Noah, and what I heard made my wolf restless in a way that moved past irritation into something more serious. He had been Alpha here long enough for the position to have become simply a fact of the territory, unconnected to effort or merit. The pack respected him the way they respected a wall — it was there and solid, they didn't think about who built it or whether it deserved to be standing. He moved through Ironveil with the ease of a man who had never once seriously considered that any of it could end.

He did not deserve the rank. I had been around enough real Alphas to know exactly what one looked like and what they didn't look like, and Noah was a man who had gotten comfortable inside someone else's work and called it his own.

And the woman whose work it was had been quietly moved to the edge of pack territory after a rejection, living in a small apartment near the pack boundary like a problem that had been neatly set aside.

I followed the general direction of the gossip until I found the right street. The territory near the pack edge was quieter, colder, with fewer members moving through it. Her building was small and clean — ordinary in every external way, nothing that looked like somewhere a Luna should be living after years of building a pack from the ground up.

I turned the corner and heard him before I saw anything.

"You think you can just walk away?" Noah's voice carried sharply in the cold morning air, tight and irritated, the voice of a man who expected to be listened to and was annoyed at having to repeat himself. "You still carry my mark, Ivy and my pup! You belong to this pack."

“Not anymore Noah, I'm done.”

I stopped.

She was standing in her doorway in an oversized cream-colored shirt tucked loosely into dark fitted trousers, She was smaller than everything I had built in my head from three days of listening to people talk about her. But she was not stepping back. Noah stood close — and she was looking at him with the expression of someone who had burned through every version of feeling available to her for this particular person and come out the other side into something cold and completely finished.

My wolf went absolutely still as Noah's hand moved toward her arm.

I pushed off the wall and walked toward them, and something in my chest that had been quiet woke up. It was a strong pull but still had a mate bond with him. I could feel the fraying threads of it in the air between them, thin and almost gone but present. It was the only reason the pull I had first felt in the trees wasn't already at full force.

It didn't matter because the moment Noah's fingers closed around her arm,

I growled at him.

"Let her go," I said.