Chapter 1 - RAYLYNN

"Hi, I'm looking for Ivy Blackwood?"

The nurse standing behind the front desk doesn't look up from her screen.

"Relation?"

"Best friend."

That gets her attention. She looks up. Her eyes leave my freckled face and make the slow, deliberate journey downward — my chest, my waist, the way my emerald trousers sit on my hips — and then come back up with the specific satisfaction of someone who has confirmed something they already believed.

I have seen this look my entire life.

"Room 404. Fourth floor.”

"Thank you,” I smile anyway.

I find the elevator, jab the button, and ride up with a man holding a bouquet of sunflowers and the specific anxious energy of someone who has done something wrong and is hoping flowers fix it.

I hope whatever he did wasn't that bad.

Somewhere during the ride, my mind wanders to last night, to the pack volunteer group chat.

I had been on my couch, sketchbook on my knee, half-watching something on my laptop, when the notifications started coming in fast enough that I picked up my phone to check.

Sasha: okay but who saw Raylynn at the heritage event last month in that white dress 💀💀

Sasha: i'm sorry but some people just don't know their size

Unknown: she really said let it all out lmaooo

Unknown: any guy dating her is basically doing charity work at this point

Unknown: Even our very own neighbourhood saint, Terry, wouldn't want to take on such a charity case.

That was when I even realised that Terry was in the group. His reply came soon after.

Terry: 🤣😂🤣 okay that's a bit much ^o^

Just that.

Not: that's my girlfriend you're talking about.

Not: delete this.

Not even: she's in this group, you know.

Unknown: wait…

Unknown: oh my god she is in here

Unknown: LMAOOO check the member list

Sasha: 💀💀💀 oops

Sasha: sorry Raylynn babe!! we're just playing!!

~ Terry has left the group ~

The doors open on the fourth floor, and I push the memory away, following the room numbers down the corridor, the smell of antiseptic and recycled air sitting heavy around me, until I find 404 and push the door open.

Ivy is sitting up in the hospital bed looking like she lost a fight with a wall.

Which, knowing Ivy, is not entirely impossible.

Her bottom lip is split. There's bruising crawling up the left side of her jaw and her right eye is swollen at the corner. Her hair, which is usually immaculate — thick, dark, always intentional — is pulled back in a messy knot that someone else clearly did for her. She's wearing a hospital gown over her jeans and she has the expression of someone who is deeply, personally offended by the existence of the room she is sitting in.

She looks up when I walk in.

"Before you say anything," she starts.

"I'm not saying anything—"

"You have your face on."

"I don't have—"

"You have a face, Ray. You're doing it right now." She points at me. "That one. The one where you're being nice on purpose."

I pull the chair from beside the wall and drag it close to the bed and sit down.

"Tell me what happened."

"I already told you what happened."

"You texted me three words: 'Hospital. Come. Now.' That's not telling me what happened."

She shifts against the pillows, wincing slightly when her jaw moves.

"Sophia Becker happened," she says it like the name tastes bad. "She's been going around telling people that Kieran chose her. That he never wanted me. That I threw myself at him like some desperate—" She stops. Presses her lips together. "I ran into her at Kellers."

"And?"

"And she said it to my face… I just lost it."

I look at her bruised jaw and split lip and swollen eye. Kieran Tierney is Ivy's ex-boyfriend. She dumped him after she found him in bed with Sophia.

"She started it, Raylynn. I'm just better at finishing."

"Clearly," I say, because knowing Ivy, Sophia would be in a worse state.

Ivy almost smiles. Then she hisses because smiling pulls at her lip.

"How bad is it?" I ask. "What are the doctors saying?"

"Nothing's broken. Two of my ribs are bruised and my eye looks terrible but they say the swelling will go down. They just want to keep me for observation because my healing is—" she waves her hand, "—slow, as usual."

Ivy heals faster than most wolves but slower than wolves of her rank — she's a beta wolf — and it has bothered her since she was old enough to understand what it meant. "They want me here until tomorrow morning."

"Okay." I reach over and take her hand.

She looks at me, guilt in her eyes. "You had an interview today."

I look down at my striped green shirt and tailored emerald pants. I had completely forgotten about the interview.

"It doesn't matter," I say.

"Raylynn—"

"It doesn't matter." I squeeze her hand once. "Stop talking. Rest your jaw."

She wants to argue. I can see it in the set of her shoulders, the way her brow pulls together. But she is tired and sore and the fight goes out of her after a moment and she leans back against the pillows and closes her eyes.

I sit with her.

The room is quiet except for the soft beep of the monitor beside her bed and the distant sound of the corridor outside. Suddenly, the door opens and my heart does the thing it has no business doing as Alpha Zephyr Blackwood steps into the room.

He's in a dark shirt, no tie, the collar of his shirt open at the throat. His hair is slightly damp at the edges like he left somewhere in a hurry.

His tall frame moves through the doorway with the kind of unhurried certainty that belongs to men who have never had to rush for anything because rooms arrange themselves around them automatically.

His eyes find me first — they do that sometimes and I have never figured out why — and the heat of his gaze hardens my nipples instantly. 

I feel the sweep of his gaze before I register he is looking, and when I do register it I become immediately, inconveniently aware of the specific way this shirt fits across my chest and the way the trousers sit on my hips and I think, not for the first time, that Ivy's tailoring is both a gift and a serious problem.

"Raylynn." His voice is low and even and it lands somewhere in my chest and stomach the way it always does. "I didn't know you were here."

"Alpha. She called me." I stand up, because sitting feels wrong suddenly, like he's caught me doing something. "I'll give you two a minute."

"You don't have to—"

"I'll be right outside," I say, and I slip past him through the door before the sentence is fully finished.

♣♣♣

I find the vending machine, buy two bottles of iced water, and press them against my temples, thinking about two things simultaneously: the sound his voice makes when he says my name, and a group chat thread where my secret boyfriend agreed that dating me is charity work.

Both thoughts are terrible.

The first I have been carrying for four years.

The other one I have been carrying for eleven hours.

“Fuck me, why does he always have such an effect on me?” I press the bottles harder. “He's my best friend's father… Goddess, this problem is getting worse.”

I don't know when exactly it started but this desire for Zephyr is eating me alive.

“Okay, let's be useful,” I drink both bottles of water and tap my cheeks. “Let's go home and grab an overnight bag for Ivy and I. I just need my—”

Shit, my phone's in my bag in the room.

I push the door open quietly, assuming they're still in the middle of something fragile, and I'm right.

Zephyr is standing near the window. Ivy is sitting up on the bed. Neither of them is shouting, which I count as progress, but the air in the room has the particular tight quality of a conversation that is one wrong word away from going sideways.

I slip in, move to the chair where my bag is sitting, and crouch down to dig for my phone.

"Sorry," I murmur. "Pretend I'm not here."

"You're not invisible, Raylynn," Ivy says, which is rich coming from the person who spent ten minutes yelling loud enough to be heard from the vending machine.

"Phone," I say, holding it up. "I'm going back to the apartment to grab stuff for tonight."

Ivy's expression immediately brightens. "You're staying?"

"Obviously I'm staying." I straighten up. "I'll be back in an hour. Don't eat anything terrible while I'm gone."

"I'm in a hospital, there's nothing good to eat."

"That's the point." I look at her. "Ivy."

She knows what I mean.

She looks at her father. Then back at me. Then at the ceiling like it has personally let her down.

"Fine," she mutters.

I catch Zephyr's eye for half a second on my way to the door then look away before my body gives off an embarrassing reaction.

I'm halfway down the corridor, phone in hand, pulling up the Rideshare app, when I hear Ivy's voice through the wall and down the hall, sudden and sharp and loud enough to carry.

"I am NOT going back to live with you — I don't care what Nan said, I don't care what anyone said—"

I stop walking, close my eyes for exactly one second then turn around and push the door back open.

Both of them look at me but I look only at Ivy.

“Ivy, don't shout so much, your ribs are bruised."

"Raylynn—"

"I'll be back in an hour." I look at her steadily. "One hour. Can you hold it together for one hour?"

She opens and closes her mouth a few times.

"Fine," she sighs, in the exact tone of someone for whom nothing is fine.

"Good." I look at Zephyr briefly, just briefly, because looking at him for longer than three seconds in this mood is genuinely not safe for my blood pressure. "She'll be okay, Alpha."

"I know," he says.

I leave before the sentence finishes landing.

♣♣♣

The afternoon air hits me the moment I step outside, warm and carrying the particular smell of a hospital car park — exhaust, tarmac, the ghost of someone's takeaway.

I take a breath of it anyway, grateful for the space, and pull up my notes app for everything we'd need as I walk toward the edge of the car park where the pickup zone is marked in faded yellow paint.

I'm typing ‘underwear’ when I hear it — sirens that are getting closer very fast.

I look up.

The ambulance comes around the corner of the building at speed, lights blazing, and I register in the same half second that I am standing directly in its path and that my legs have not yet received the message to move—

A hand closes around my arm.

Hard, certain, no hesitation.

I'm pulled back and sideways and then I'm not standing in the path of anything anymore because I am pressed flush against something solid and warm and the ambulance tears past close enough that I feel the rush of displaced air against my side.

But that's not the problem… 

I am standing with my back against Zephyr's chest, his arm is a band across my waist, his other hand still closed around my arm where he grabbed me, and I can feel — I am acutely, immediately, devastatingly aware of — exactly how solid he is.

The heat of him through his jacket, the steadiness of his controlled breathing, his chin above my head. I can feel every point of contact between his body.

Warmth moves from where his arm crosses my waist and travels downward. I feel it settle, warm and insistent, between my thighs.

I am standing in a hospital car park in broad daylight having a reaction that belongs nowhere near a hospital car park in broad daylight…