Chapter 10

Ivy sat on the edge of the bed for a long time after Kade let her walk away, staring at nothing, replaying her own voice shaking in front of a room full of strangers.

A knock came at the door an hour later. Sharp. Businesslike.

"It's Elena," said a voice through the wood. "I'm not here to make things worse. I wanted to say the meeting shouldn't have gone that way. Damon had no right to say it like that, in front of everyone."

Ivy walked over and opened the door partway, not all the way.

"Is that an apology?"

"It's an observation." Elena's face was as composed as always, no softness in it that Ivy could find. "I still think you walked into something you don't understand the size of. That hasn't changed. But you didn't deserve to hear it that way, from him, in a room full of people deciding your future for you." She paused. "Get some rest. Tomorrow will be worse before it's better."

She left before Ivy could say anything else, heels sharp on the floor, same as the first day.

Ivy closed the door and leaned against it, more unsettled by that than she would have been by outright cruelty. At least cruelty was simple.

She didn't call Kade. She didn't call Dani, either — there wasn't a version of this she could explain over the phone that wouldn't sound like the beginning of a breakdown. Instead, without really deciding to, she found herself scrolling to a number she'd only called once before, the day she signed the contract.

Priya picked up on the third ring.

"Ivy? It's late. Is everything okay?"

"Define okay." Ivy sat down hard on the floor, back against the bed, phone pressed tight to her ear. "The whole pack knows I'm pregnant. They know it happened after one pairing. Kade's cousin announced it in front of the entire council like it was a weapon, and now everyone in that house is looking at me like I'm either a miracle or a threat, and I don't understand which one is true."

Silence on the line. Long enough that Ivy checked to see if the call had dropped.

"Priya?"

"One pairing," Priya said, quiet now, all the brisk professionalism gone out of her voice. "That's — Ivy, I need you to think back to your intake paperwork. Did anyone ever ask you about your family history? Grandparents, specifically?"

"There was a form. Ancestry questions. I didn't think much of it."

"You wrote that your maternal grandmother died before you were born and your family didn't talk about her much. Do you remember that?"

Ivy's stomach went tight. "How do you remember that? You must screen a hundred candidates a year."

"Because it flagged something in the system," Priya said. "Something I wasn't supposed to look into further, and did anyway, because it didn't sit right with me. I found an old registry record. Sealed, mostly, but not sealed well enough if you know where to look."

"What kind of registry."

Priya's voice dropped lower, like she was checking that she was alone before she said it.

"A pack registry. From sixty years ago. There's a name on it that's close enough to your grandmother's maiden name that it can't be a coincidence. A woman cast out of her pack for marrying a human. Stripped of standing, records altered, the kind of thing packs used to do to erase someone completely." A breath. "Ivy, I think your grandmother wasn't just human. I think she was one of them, and I think somebody spent sixty years making sure nobody would ever be able to prove it."

Ivy couldn't speak for a moment. The room felt too small and too big at the same time.

"Why didn't you tell me this before I signed anything?"

"Because I wasn't sure. Because it wasn't confirmed, and dropping something like that on a woman about to sign a life-changing contract felt cruel if I was wrong." Priya's voice cracked, just slightly, the first real crack Ivy had ever heard in it. "I should have told you anyway. I'm telling you now because whatever's happening in that house, you deserve to walk into it knowing what you actually are, not just what everyone else keeps deciding about you."

"Does Kade know?"

"I don't know what Kade knows," Priya said. "But if Damon's people are as sharp as I think they are, they'll find that same registry eventually, if they haven't already. And Ivy — if a bloodline like that gets confirmed, this stops being about whether Kade lied to you. It becomes about whether your child even has a legal claim to inherit anything at all."

The line went quiet again, and somewhere down the hall, Ivy heard footsteps stop right outside her door.