Chapter 2: What the Forest Found

Ivy walked for two days before her legs finally gave out beneath her.

She didn't shift, she was too raw, too hollowed out by the broken bond, and an unstable shift in unclaimed territory could get a lone wolf killed by something far bigger than heartbreak. So she walked human, cold and starving and half out of her mind with grief, until the trees blurred together into a single dark wall and her knees finally buckled in a clearing she'd never be able to find again on purpose.

She expected to die there. Some small, exhausted part of her thought that might actually be easier than living with what Kane had done to her in front of everyone she'd ever known.

Instead, she woke up warm.

"You're awake." The voice belonged to an older man with silver threading through his temples and eyes the color of the sky right before a storm breaks. He was crouched by a low, crackling fire, watching her the way you'd watch something wounded and unpredictable that might still bite. "You've been out for a day and a half. I was starting to think I'd have to dig a hole and bury you out here."

"Where am I?" Her throat felt like sandpaper.

"Thorne territory. What's left of it, anyway." He handed her a waterskin, and she drank like she'd never stop, like her body had forgotten how thirst was supposed to end. "I'm Magnus. Alpha, for whatever that title is worth out here. We're not much of a pack, if I'm honest with you. Mostly strays. People other territories decided they didn't want anymore."

Something about the way he said it made her chest ache in a way she wasn't prepared for. "Sounds familiar."

Magnus studied her for a long, quiet moment, the fire popping between them. "Ashford territory rejected an omega a few days back. Word travels fast, even out here where nothing else does." His eyes flicked to the faint, ugly scar the broken bond had carved across her collarbone, a mark only another wolf would ever recognize for what it was. "That was you."

Ivy didn't answer. She didn't have to.

"I'm not going to ask you to talk about it," Magnus said gently. "But I am going to ask you something else. What do you feel, right now, underneath the wolf you think you are?"

"Nothing. I feel like nothing at all."

"Wrong answer." He almost smiled, and it changed his whole face. "Try again. What do you feel underneath that nothing?"

She opened her mouth to argue out of pure habit and stopped, because something old and sharp had uncurled deep in her chest the moment he'd asked, something that had apparently been sleeping her entire life inside a pack that told her, over and over, that she was weak.

"Anger," she said slowly, testing the word like it belonged to someone else. "I feel angry."

"Good." Magnus stood, offering her his hand. "Anger, I can work with. Weakness was never actually your problem, girl. Nobody ever bothered teaching you what you truly were underneath it."

"And what's that, exactly?"

His eyes gleamed a deep, unfamiliar gold in the firelight, a color that didn't belong to any bloodline she'd ever heard mentioned in Ashford territory.

"You carry the Thorne mark on your collarbone, hidden just under that rejection scar. I've only seen it once before, on my own mother, before she died protecting this land. It means you're not some ordinary omega born into the wrong pack by mistake." He crouched down until his eyes were level with hers. "It means somewhere down your bloodline, an old Alpha line went into hiding to survive. And it just woke up inside you tonight."

Ivy stared at him, waiting for the joke to land.

He wasn't joking.

"Get some rest," Magnus said, standing and brushing the dirt from his knees. "Tomorrow, I start teaching you how to actually become what you already are."

She lay back down beside the fire, and for the first time since the rejection had torn through her chest, the cold place inside her didn't feel quite so empty.

It felt like it was waiting for something to fill it.