Chapter Three

Chapter Three

What's Mine to Protect

I woke up not knowing where I was, and for exactly one second, that was a mercy.

No ceremony hall. No laughter still ringing in my ears. Just an unfamiliar ceiling, pale morning light through a window that faced the wrong direction, and a half-breath of nothing before memory caught up and slammed back into place like a door blown shut by wind.

Silver Wolf territory. Callan's pack. Kade's voice still living somewhere behind my sternum, low and possessive, promising I'd come crawling back.

I sat up slowly, and that was when I saw the wardrobe.

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Someone had filled it. Not with the kind of clothes that got handed to me back home — things bought for a smaller sister and let out at the seams, apologetic fabric that always seemed to be sorry for the body it was covering. These were mine, actually mine, cut for someone my size instead of adjusted for it. No begging fabric. No safety pins hidden at the waistband.

I stood in front of it for a long time before I let myself hesitate in front of the mirror instead, which was worse.

Old habit doesn't care about new evidence. I stood there cataloguing myself anyway — arms, stomach, the soft place at my hips — running the same cruel inventory Kade had taught an entire pack to run on me, like my body might have changed overnight just because the room around it had.

I was still doing it, still deciding whether I had permission to leave the room and exist in front of strangers, when the door swung open without a knock.

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"Training starts at—"

Callan stopped mid-sentence.

He'd walked in already talking, brisk, a man with a schedule and no patience for anything that wasn't on it, and then he actually saw me — frozen in front of the mirror, arms half-wrapped around myself like I could physically hold my own judgment at bay.

For a beat, his eyes moved over me. Not cruel. Not pitying, which would have been almost as bad. Something hotter than either, gone again so fast I almost doubted I'd seen it. Then his jaw tightened, and when he spoke again his voice had an edge in it that sounded almost like anger — not at me.

"You've got a body every man in this pack would kill to wake up next to," he said, rough, irritated, like I'd personally inconvenienced him by not already knowing this, "and you're standing here like you need permission to exist in it."

He held the door open wider.

"Get dressed, Ivy. We've got work to do."

It wasn't romantic in any way I recognized. No greeting-card softness, no hand on my cheek, no telling me I was beautiful in a voice built for it. It landed harder than that would have. He wasn't performing sympathy for my benefit. He was annoyed on my behalf, like my hesitation was an error in his otherwise well-run pack that he intended to correct through sheer refusal to indulge it.

I got dressed.

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Breakfast was a long table under an open awning, wolves eating in loud, easy clusters, nobody arranging themselves for an audience because there wasn't one to arrange for.

I filled my plate and then stood there too long, portion frozen halfway between generous and safe, some old reflex counting calories on someone else's behalf before I'd even sat down. Across the table, a warrior — broad-shouldered, scarred knuckles — glanced over, and every muscle in my body braced automatically for the joke that was surely coming.

Callan didn't look up from his own plate.

"Give her another plate," he said to the cook, easy, unbothered, like he was commenting on the weather. "She'll need the energy if she's training today."

That was all. No speech. No pointed look around the table daring anyone to say something. Just fact, stated flat, and then he went back to his food like the matter was closed because it was.

No one laughed.

No one stared.

I waited for the joke that never came. The silence felt louder than any laughter back home ever had — a silence with nothing hiding inside it, no punchline waiting to drop the second I let my guard down. I ate the whole plate. It was the first meal in longer than I could remember that had just been a meal.

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In the training ring later, Callan stepped up behind me to correct my stance, his hands finding my shoulders first, adjusting the angle, brisk and professional right up until they weren't.

His hand settled at my waist. Warm. Sure. Fingers spanning wider than they needed to for a simple correction.

He held it there a second longer than the stance required, thumb brushing once against my side, and I felt that single point of contact travel straight up my spine like a lit fuse.

When I glanced back at him, he was already looking away, jaw flexed tight, like a man who'd just caught himself doing something he had no intention of admitting to. Neither of us said anything. I told myself the warmth still sitting low in my stomach was leftover adrenaline from the stance drill.

I didn't entirely believe myself.

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I felt him before I saw him.

The bond yanked hard behind my ribs, a hook dragging without warning, and I turned toward the tree line already knowing before my eyes confirmed it. Kade crossed onto Silver Wolf land like the boundary stones were decorative — like pack law was a rule written for other people.

He didn't look like the man from the ceremony. That version had been polished, golden, bored enough to be cruel without effort. This one had bloodshot eyes and unwashed hair, a man who hadn't slept since the night he'd let me walk out a door.

"Ivy." His voice cracked on my name, raw in a way I'd never once heard from him. "You don't belong here. Come home. I'll fix it."

I stepped forward before Callan could move, my heart slamming but my voice, when it came, steady.

"Fix it?" The laugh that came out of me was sharp, humorless. "You rejected me in front of your entire pack. Called me a fatass like it cost you nothing. And now you show up here looking like a kicked dog, begging?" I held his eyes. "I'm not your property, Kade. Not anymore."

Something moved through his face — pain first, unguarded and real, and then anger chasing it out, and underneath both of them the same obsession I'd felt in that hallway, alive and untouched by any of it.

"You're still mine." His hand closed around my arm, grip already bruising. "The bond knows it. I know it. You're coming with me. Now."

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Callan moved like something poured rather than stepped.

One second he was three feet away. The next his fingers were locked around Kade's wrist, and the sound that followed was quiet — a small, precise crack, bone protesting a pressure it had no leverage to resist — and Kade's grip tore off my arm like it had been switched off.

"Touch her again," Callan said, and his voice never rose, never needed to, "and I'll break every finger you have. Then I'll let my pack watch while I take the rest."

He didn't posture. He didn't circle or snarl or perform the kind of rage Kade wore so easily. He simply twisted, unhurried, until Kade's knee buckled and he went down onto the packed dirt, teeth bared around a sound caught somewhere between fury and pain.

Callan's eyes never left his face. Cold. Controlled. Alpha in a register I hadn't seen from him yet, and something about the sheer economy of it — no wasted motion, no wasted breath — sent an unwanted shiver straight down my spine.

This was the man who'd been watching me for months before I'd ever known his name. This was the ruthlessness sitting quietly underneath every calm offer he'd made me. And some traitorous, exhausted part of me found it — God help me — beautiful to watch.

"She's my mate—" Kade snarled up from the ground, desperate now.

"She was your mate." Callan's correction came almost gently, which made it worse. "You threw her away. She's under my protection now. Leave, or I'll send you home in pieces and call it mercy."

For the first time since I'd known him, real fear crossed Kade's face. His eyes found mine again, voice fracturing into something smaller.

"I was drunk," he said. "I was stupid. I'll fix the rejection, I'll do the ceremony again, whatever you need — please, Ivy."

The begging was new. The crack running through him was new. He wasn't just possessive anymore. He was coming apart, and some old, tired part of me almost pitied him for it.

Almost.

I stepped closer instead, looking down at the man who used to be able to make me feel like nothing with four slurred words.

"You don't get to break me and then decide you want the pieces back," I said. "Go home, Kade."

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Two of Callan's wolves escorted him off the territory, and the training field went quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet after violence — not peaceful, just spent, adrenaline still crackling under everyone's skin with nowhere left to go.

Callan turned to face me. His knuckles were split, blood welling along two of them, and he didn't seem to notice or care.

He reached toward my face slowly, giving me time to step back if I wanted to, and brushed a loose strand of hair off my cheek with a gentleness that had no business belonging to the same hand that had just broken bone.

For a second neither of us moved. Close enough that I could feel the heat rolling off him, close enough that my pulse was racing again for a reason that had nothing to do with fear this time.

I wanted to lean into it.

I wanted to run.

I took one step back instead, unsettled by how safe his violence had made me feel — unsettled that safety and danger had just come from the exact same set of hands.

"You enjoyed that," I said quietly.

Callan's smile was small, and it didn't try to pretend otherwise.

"I enjoyed protecting what's mine."

The words should have frightened me. They didn't. And that — more than Kade's begging, more than the bond still humming faint and confused in my chest — was the thing that actually scared me.