Chapter 5; When The Past Returns.

Ivy's POV

"Blackthorn Pack again," my assistant said, stepping into my office with a look I had long since learned to recognize. "They're requesting a formal meeting this time, not just a phone call. Said they're prepared to offer better terms than last quarter."

"Same answer as always." I did not even look up from my screen. "We're not interested in partnering with Blackthorn. Tell them politely, and tell them clearly, so they stop wasting both our time asking."

She hesitated at the door. "They've asked six times this year alone. Some of them might start wondering why we keep saying no to a deal that would make us both a fortune."

"Let them wonder."

My voice came out sharper than I intended, but I did not soften it. Blackthorn Pack meant Dante, and Dante meant a version of my life I had buried five years ago along with the girl who used to love him.

The woman in the mirror this morning bore almost no resemblance to that girl, the one who once fled a house before sunrise with nothing but a single bag on her shoulder. Five years had changed nearly everything about me, down to the bones of who I was.

Gone was the thin, trembling thing who used to flinch at raised voices and cry herself to sleep in strange rented rooms. My wolf had finally woken the night I gave birth alone, screaming through hours of labor with no one beside me but a stranger doctor and my own stubborn will to survive it, and something about becoming a mother in that much pain had burned away the last of my softness.

My body had changed with her, growing leaner and stronger, quicker on my feet in a way that felt like power instead of fear. My eyes, once a dull, plain brown, had shifted into something sharper and more amber, catching light the way a wolf's eyes do, and my hair had thickened and darkened until it gleamed under any light it touched.

I had gone from a frightened Omega who flinched at footsteps to a woman who finally carried her wolf close to the surface, and the shift had remade my whole aura in the process.

I had buried Wren so completely that even her own scent had changed.

I stood taller now. I had built an entire company out of nothing but desperation and a talent for connecting people who did not trust each other, and I had done it all under a new name and a new face, one that had nothing to do with the girl I used to be.

Nobody at Thornbridge Trading Co. called me Wren. To the world, I was Ivy Sinclair, CEO, the woman who had somehow built a bridge between the human world and the wolf packs that mostly wanted nothing to do with each other.

I had built Ivy Sinclair specifically so that man would never again have a reason to look twice in my direction, and I intended to keep it that way no matter how many contracts his pack dangled in front of me.

My assistant left, and I had barely returned to my numbers when my phone rang with a call I always dreaded more than any business crisis. The hospital's name flashed on the screen, and my stomach dropped straight through the floor.

"This is Ivy," I answered, already reaching for my coat.

"Ms. Sinclair, it's Dr. Marsh." His voice was calm in the practiced way doctors used when they didn't want you to panic before you had all the facts. "Nora's fever spiked again this morning. I think you should come in."

"I'm on my way. Is she..." I could not even finish the question.

"She's stable for now," he said. "But we need to talk when you get here."

I do not remember the drive to the hospital. I only remember arriving at my daughter's room and finding her small body curled beneath thin white sheets, her cheeks flushed with heat, her breathing shallow enough to make my chest ache just watching it.

Dr. Marsh met me in the hallway before I could go in, his expression carefully arranged into something gentle.

"We've run more tests," he said. "It's what we suspected. A rare condition, one that shows up almost exclusively in werewolf children whose parentage involves certain bloodline conflicts."

"It's not common, but it's not unheard of either, especially in cases where the parents themselves come from complicated lineage."

"Say what you actually mean, doctor."

"It means her illness is likely tied to who her parents are to each other." He said it as gently as those words could be said. "Close blood, close bond. The wolf inside her is fighting itself."

I understood exactly what he was not quite saying out loud. Nora's illness had roots in exactly the thing I had spent five years trying to erase, the fact that her father and I shared a house, a family, and blood close enough that some old wolf magic clearly did not approve of what we had made together.

"Whatever she needs," I said, my voice steadier than I felt, "she gets it. I don't care what it costs or how long it takes. She is not losing this fight."

"I didn't expect anything less from you, Ms. Sinclair."

He nodded and let me pass into the room, where Nora blinked up at me with glassy, fever-bright eyes and managed a small, hopeful smile anyway, because five-year-olds are somehow always braver than the adults trying to save them.

"Mommy," she whispered, "can I have ice cream? The strawberry kind."

"Of course you can, baby." I smoothed her damp hair back from her forehead, pressing a kiss there like I could will the fever away through sheer stubbornness.

"And next time," she added, eyelids drooping, "I want the bunny. The soft one with the pink ears, from the shop by our building."

"You'll have the bunny too. I promise." I would have promised her the moon in that moment, and meant it completely.

"Pinky promise?"

"Pinky promise." I hooked my smallest finger around hers, the way we always did, and watched her drift off with the ghost of a smile still on her lips.

I stayed until she was fully asleep, watching the small rise and fall of her chest for far longer than I needed to, because some nights the fear that I might lose her sat so heavy in me that I could not make myself walk away.

She was the only thing in five years I had never once regretted, the reason I had learned to fight instead of hide, and loving her this much sometimes felt like standing too close to a fire I would gladly burn in if it meant keeping her warm.

When I finally forced myself toward the door, I slipped out to find the strawberry ice cream I had promised her, my mind still tangled in everything Dr. Marsh had said about bloodlines and old wolf magic and consequences I had spent five years refusing to think about.

I reached the elevator at the end of the hall and pressed the button without really seeing it, exhaustion pulling at every part of me.

The doors slid open, and every thought in my head went silent at once at the sight of him.

He looked older in the way that only made him more striking, sharper along the jaw, broader through the shoulders, dressed in a dark suit that fit him like he had been born into that kind of authority.

My hand froze halfway to the railing. My pulse spiked so hard and so fast that I could feel it in my throat, in my fingertips, in the sudden cold sweat prickling along the back of my neck.

For one wild second I forgot how to breathe entirely, my heart slamming against my ribs so violently I was certain he could hear it over the hum of the elevator. Every instinct in me screamed to run, to hit the button and let the doors close again, but my legs would not obey.

Some traitorous part of me still recognized him on a level five years and a new name could never fully erase, and that recognition rooted me to the floor even as panic clawed up my spine.

"Dante," I whispered, so softly I barely heard it myself.