Chapter 2

What the Bond Takes

Ivy didn't have the strength to run.

She stayed on her knees in the wet grass, one hand still pressed to her chest, and watched three shapes come toward her out of the dark. Torchlight caught them before their faces did. She recognized the uniform first  pack enforcers, the ones who answered only to the Alpha's household and then, a step behind them, a face she wished she didn't know so well. Seraphine.

Still in her ceremonial white, though someone had thrown a cloak over her shoulders against the night air. She stopped a few feet away and looked down at Ivy with an expression that wasn't quite triumph and wasn't quite pity. Something colder than both.

"You shouldn't be out here alone," Seraphine said. "It isn't safe. Not tonight, of all nights."

"I'm fine." Ivy forced herself upright, though her legs shook doing it. "You can go back to your party."

"It isn't a party anymore. It's a coronation." Seraphine's eyes flicked over her, taking in the state of her, the grass stains, the shaking hands, the sweat cooling on her skin. "You felt it break, didn't you. The bond."

Ivy said nothing. She didn't need to.

"I'm told it's supposed to hurt less by morning." Seraphine's voice was almost gentle, which somehow made it worse. "I wouldn't know. I've never had one to lose."

One of the enforcers stepped forward and cleared his throat, the way men did when they'd been given an unpleasant job and wanted it over with quickly. "Ivy. By order of the Alpha, effective tonight, your standing in this pack is revoked."

"On what grounds." She kept her voice level. It cost her everything she had left.

"The bond that held your place here has been formally severed. Without a mate-claim or blood-rank, unattached wolves don't hold territory rights." He recited it like something memorized, which it probably was. "You have until sundown tomorrow to leave pack lands. After that, you'll be treated as a trespasser."

The words took a moment to land, the way the cold sometimes did before you realized how deep it had gotten.

"This is my home," Ivy said. "I was born here."

"I'm sorry." He didn't sound it, not really, but he had the decency to look uncomfortable saying it. "Those are the terms."

Seraphine watched this without expression, and Ivy understood, with sudden clarity, that the terms hadn't come from the enforcer, or even from the Alpha. They'd come from her. A new Luna's first order, delivered before the ink on her title had dried, aimed at the one loose thread that might have unraveled the alliance if left alone.

"Does he know?" Ivy asked. "Does Damian know you're out here doing this?"

Something flickered behind Seraphine's composure, there and gone too fast to name. "Damian," she said, "doesn't decide things like this anymore. Not without me."

She turned before Ivy could answer that, cloak sweeping behind her, and walked back toward the lights and noise of the hall. The enforcers lingered a moment longer, as if waiting to see whether Ivy would argue, or beg, or fall apart in front of them.

She did none of those things. She made herself stand very straight until they left, and only once their footsteps had faded completely did she allow her knees to buckle again.

She spent what was left of the night in the small room she'd lived in since she was a pup, packing the little she owned into a single travel bag by candlelight, because sundown tomorrow did not feel like nearly enough time and she refused to waste a single hour of it grieving something that had already decided, quite clearly, that it did not want her grief.

Her mother found her there just before dawn.

"You don't have to go," her mother said from the doorway, though they both knew that wasn't true. "We could ask the elders. There might be an exception"

"There isn't." Ivy folded the last of her clothes without looking up. "There's never an exception for wolves like me. You know that better than anyone."

Her mother didn't argue the point, because there was nothing to argue. She crossed the room instead and pulled Ivy into her arms, and for one unguarded moment Ivy let herself be held the way she hadn't since she was small enough for it to fix things.

"Where will you go?" her mother asked.

Ivy had been turning that question over for hours, ever since the enforcer's words had finally stopped ringing in her ears long enough to let her think. She knew, distantly, of a territory three days' hard travel to the north  the Silver City Pack, ruled by something that wasn't quite an Alpha at all, a place with a reputation for taking in wolves that other packs had discarded. She had never been there. She had never needed to be.

"North," she said. "There's a pack there that doesn't ask where you came from."

Her mother's arms tightened. "That's rogue territory between here and there. Three days through unclaimed land, alone."

"I don't have another option." Ivy pulled back gently and picked up her bag. "I have until sundown. I'd rather use every hour of it walking away from here than spend it waiting for someone to change their mind."

She left before the sun was fully up, slipping out through the kitchen gardens so she wouldn't have to pass the grand hall, still littered with the remains of last night's celebration. She didn't look back at the pack house. She had promised herself that much, at least one clean break, no lingering, no last glance to make the leaving harder than it already was.

She made it past the northern boundary marker by midafternoon, the pack lands falling away behind her into hills she'd known her whole life and would likely never see again. Ahead of her lay unclaimed ground three days of it, wolves said, where no pack held authority and no pack's protection meant anything at all.

She was three hours into that unclaimed ground, moving fast to put distance between herself and the border before nightfall, when she caught the scent. It was wrong, sharp and close.

Something out there in the tree line was tracking her, and it had been for longer than she wanted to admit  long enough that whatever it was already knew exactly how alone she was.