Chapter 3

Unclaimed Ground

Ivy didn't stop walking. Stopping would tell whatever was out there that she'd noticed.

She kept her pace even, her breathing steady, and let her eyes do the work instead of her feet, scanning the tree line without turning her head, the way Bertram had drilled into every young wolf who'd ever picked up a blade under him. Panic tells a predator everything it needs to know. Calm tells it nothing.

The scent came again on the next gust of wind. Sharper this time. Closer.

Not pack. She would have known pack, known it the way you know a voice you grew up hearing. This was something else musky and wild, undisciplined, the scent of a wolf that answered to no one and hadn't in a long time. A rogue.

She had heard about rogues her whole life the way children hear about storms, something dangerous that happened to other people, in other places, far from anywhere safe. She understood now, with her heart hammering and her bag suddenly heavy across her shoulders, that she had walked directly into the kind of story she used to only half believe. The undergrowth shifted thirty feet to her left.

Ivy didn't run. Running was an invitation. Instead she angled toward a break in the tree line ahead, open ground, where at least she'd see anything coming instead of being ambushed blindly and quickened her pace just enough to look purposeful rather than afraid. It didn't work.

The rogue came out of the trees in wolf form, low and fast, cutting the distance before she'd made it halfway to open ground. Ivy's body reacted before her mind caught up, dropping her bag and pivoting hard to put a fallen tree between them. The wolf skidded past, snarling, already turning to come at her again.

She had no weapon. She had barely any training worth the name. What she had was the fence rail conversation with Bertram running through her head on a loop, find the angle, not the fight and the sharp, clean knowledge that if she froze here, she would not survive to regret it.

The wolf lunged over the fallen tree. Ivy dropped flat instead of dodging sideways, letting its momentum carry it past her, and drove her elbow up hard into its exposed throat as it passed. It wasn't strength. She didn't have the strength for a killing blow, not against something that size. But it was enough to choke the air out of its lunge, enough to send it crashing off-balance into the underbrush with a strangled yelp instead of landing on top of her.

She didn't wait to see if it would recover. She grabbed her bag and ran.

She ran until her lungs burned and the trees blurred and she couldn't hear anything behind her over the sound of her own heartbeat, and only then did she let herself slow, chest heaving, hands shaking so badly she nearly dropped her bag a second time.

She had survived. That fact took a while to land, the way the ultimatum had, the way the bond breaking had. She stood alone in unclaimed territory with her whole body trembling and something small and unfamiliar unfurling underneath the fear.

She had survived, and she had done it herself.

The next two days blurred into a rhythm of walking, resting in short unsafe snatches, and staying alert to every sound the forest made. She ate almost nothing,  what little food she'd packed wasn't meant to last three days, not really, and she rationed it anyway rather than go without entirely. She slept in a tree the first night, wedged into a fork of branches too high for most things to reach, and didn't sleep at all the second, too aware of every rustle in the dark to risk closing her eyes.

By the third day, exhaustion had settled into her bones in a way that frightened her more than the rogue had. Her steps had gone uneven. Her thoughts kept sliding sideways, toward home, toward Damian's face in the torchlight, toward things she didn't have the strength left to feel properly and so simply let drift past unfinished.

She crossed into new territory sometime in the late afternoon, she knew it the way every wolf knew it, a shift in the air, an unmistakable sense of claimed ground replacing the lawless emptiness behind her. Scent markers grew stronger here, deliberate, maintained. Someone patrolled this land and wanted anyone crossing it to know so.

She kept walking anyway, because stopping now, this close, felt like giving up on the last three days entirely.

The Silver City Pack's border gate came into view just as the light started failing, tall timber walls, torches already being lit along the top, wolves moving with the kind of purpose that spoke of real structure, a real chain of command, a place that functioned. Ivy stood at the edge of the tree line and stared at it, and felt, for one dizzying moment, something close to relief.

Then her legs simply stopped working. She went down hard, the ground rushing up faster than she could brace for it, her vision narrowing to a tunnel and then to nothing. The last thing she registered before the dark took her completely was the sound of raised voices near the gate, someone shouting, someone else running and the distinct, bone-deep certainty that she had made it exactly as far as her body would allow, and not one step further. Whether that was far enough, she wouldn't find out until she woke.

If she woke.