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Chapter 11
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2026-08-24 17:41:17"I have to go " Ivy said into the phone fast and quiet. "Someone is outside."
"Call me back when you can " Priya said. "Please. Do not sit on this alone."
Ivy hung up. Stood up. Her heart was pounding. She opened the door before whoever it was could even knock.
Kade stood in the hallway with his hand raised halfway through a knock. It looked like Kade had been standing there working up the nerve for longer than Ivy realized.
"I was not going to bother you tonight " Kade said. "I just needed to see that you were okay. I can go."
"Don't." The word came out before Ivy could even decide to say it. "Come in.. I am still angry. That does not change just because you showed up looking like that."
"Looking like what?"
"Like a man who has not slept and knows whose fault that is." Ivy stepped back to let Kade in anyway.
Kade sat in the chair by the window. It was the spot Elena had taken an hour earlier. Ivy noticed, in a way that everyone in this house seemed to prefer that chair over being close to her on the bed. Maybe it was easier to say things from a distance.
"I owe you an apology " Kade said. "Not the kind I gave you in the kitchen. A full one."
"I am listening."
"I knew you were my mate the second I smelled you in that clinic. I told myself the contract mattered more than the truth. I thought the truth would have scared you off. I needed an heir more than I needed to be honest. That was selfish. I let Damon say it in front of the pack instead of telling you myself. Even if I did not plan that moment I let it happen of stopping it the second I could have." Kade looked at Ivy, steady and without any walls up this time. "I am sorry. Not because I got caught. Because it was wrong. I knew it was wrong the whole time I was doing it."
Ivy studied the face of Kade for a moment. Ivy was weighing the apology against four days of truths.
"That is better " Ivy said finally. "It is not enough yet.. It is better."
"I will take better."
Something eased in the chest of Ivy, a little bit enough to notice. Ivy thought about the voice of Priya on the phone about the registry and about the sealed record with the name of her grandmother half-buried in it. Ivy thought about how easy it would be to tell Kade now and how Ivy was not ready to do that yet.
Kade had kept a secret from Ivy for four days. Ivy could keep one for a night.
"Get some sleep " Ivy said instead. "You look like you are about to fall over."
"I will. Soon." Kade did not move to leave. Ivy did not ask him to. "Can I ask you something?"
"Depends what it is."
"When your phone rang earlier. Before I knocked. Who were you talking to?"
The stomach of Ivy tightened. "Priya. Just checking in. Making sure I was handling everything okay."
It was not a lie. It also was not the truth. Ivy felt the words sit wrong in her mouth the second Ivy said them. It felt like an echo of every half-answer Kade had given Ivy all week.
Kade studied Ivy for a beat long like Kade had caught something in the voice of Ivy that Kade could not quite name yet and then Kade let it go.
"Okay " Kade said. "Get some rest."
Kade left before either of them could say anything. Ivy sat down on the bed. The phone was still warm in the hand of Ivy. Ivy felt the weight of the settle into the chest of Ivy right next to all the other secrets already living there.
The knock that came twenty minutes later was different. It was fast and urgent.
"Ivy it is Rhys. You need to open up."
Ivy opened the door to find Rhys out of breath. It looked like Rhys had run the way from wherever Rhys had come from. The scar-through-eyebrow face of Rhys was tight with something that was not his easy calm.
"What is wrong?"
"Damon just pulled the packs archive. All of it going back a hundred years including the sealed records." Rhys kept the voice of Rhys low. Rhys glanced down the hall like Rhys expected someone to be listening. "He told the archivist it was due diligence, given tonights announcement. Nobody believed that for a second."
The blood of Ivy went cold.
"He is looking for something."
"He is looking for a reason " Rhys said. ". From what I hear he already has someone, on his side who knows exactly where to dig."
"Who?"
Rhys hesitated. In that hesitation Ivy already knew the answer was going to be bad.
"Elena " Rhys said. "She left the compound an hour ago. She told the gate she was visiting her sister. Nobody has heard from Elena since."
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Ivy took the stairs two at a time.She hit the nursery door with her shoulder and nearly fell inside. The room was warm and bright. Margaret sat in the rocking chair by the window with Rowan on her lap, holding a wooden block out of his reach and laughing at him."Easy," Margaret said, looking up. "You'll wake the whole house."Ivy didn't answer. She crossed the room, scooped Rowan up, and held him against her chest so tight he squawked. He smelled like milk and soap. He was fine. He was completely fine."Ivy." Margaret stood slowly. "What happened?""Nothing. Not yet." Ivy's voice shook. "Mom, I need you to stay right here. Don't leave this room. Don't open the door for anyone but me or Kade."Margaret looked at her for a long moment. Then she sat back down and folded her hands in her lap."I've been through worse than a locked door," she said. "Go."Kade was already in the hallway. Rhys was behind him, talking fast into a radio, and two guards had taken up places on either side of t
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Wren slept for almost a full day after she arrived. When she woke, she sat at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and stared at Rowan like he was a ghost."He has Ashgrove eyes," she said quietly. "Under the amber. Look, when the light hits them just right."Ivy hadn't noticed that before. She looked, and there it was. A faint ring of silver around the dark center."Odalys says it means the bloodline is strong in him.""It means he's going to be hard to hide," Wren said. Not unkindly. "Anyone who knows what to look for will see it.""Like the Warden."Wren's hand tightened around her mug. "Like the Warden."Odalys spent that whole week in the old pack library, going through shelves nobody had touched in decades. Kade joined her every evening after Rowan went to bed. Ivy brought them tea and sat on the floor between the stacks, reading whatever pages they handed her."Here's something," Odalys said on the sixth night. She laid a brittle book on the table, open to a page covered in tiny
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Odalys knew where to start."The Sorrell family kept a cabin," she said, spreading an old, hand-drawn map across Kade's study table. "Deep in the hills, two days' travel from here. I visited once, as a girl, before the scattering. If any of them survived that night, that cabin's the most likely place they'd have gone.""Two days is a long time to leave Rowan again," Ivy said, though she was already reaching for her coat."I'll go with Odalys," Kade said. "You should stay, this time. Rowan needs one of us close, and Rhys still has concerns about lingering Thorne loyalists testing our security while attention's split."Ivy hesitated, torn, then nodded slowly. "Bring back whatever you find. All of it, even the parts that are hard to hear.""Especially those," Kade agreed.Ivy stayed home for three days that felt longer than any of the three-day countdowns she'd survived over the past year, pacing between the nursery and Rhys's security updates, waiting for word.It came on the evening of
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They drove home three days later, exhausted, Damon's border pack finally settling after Bram's release, though the question Fern had raised sat heavy in the car the whole way north.Kade requested the old council archive the morning they arrived, before he'd even properly slept, standing in the same records room Damon had once pulled the Ashgrove registry from under far less honest circumstances."I need every file from my grandfather's tenure," he told the archivist. "Border actions. Council decrees. Anything marked 'cleansing' or 'security measure' from that era."The archivist hesitated. "Some of those files are sealed, sir. Your grandfather sealed a number of records himself, before he died.""Unseal them," Kade said. "All of them. I don't care what's in there. I need to know."Ivy watched him work through the afternoon, jaw tight, methodical in a way that reminded her of the man who'd once told her the truth about a fated mate flag only because he couldn't stand hiding it any lon
The Alpha's Plump mate Chapter 39
"Don't move," Fern said quietly, arriving behind them, breathless from the run. "Not yet. Let it come to you rather than chasing it. It's been waiting. Waiting means it's still capable of choosing, somewhere underneath the hunger."Ivy stepped forward anyway, slow, deliberate, ignoring Kade's hand tightening around her arm."Ivy—""I have to try," she said quietly. "He's been alone for forty years, Kade. If there's any part of him left that can still choose, I don't want him choosing in a courtyard full of people who are all afraid of him."Kade's jaw worked, every instinct in him clearly screaming to pull her back, but he let go, stepping with her instead of in front of her this time, close enough that Ivy could feel the warmth of him even through the unnatural cold radiating off the shape ahead of them."Bram," she said, voice steady despite the fear hammering in her chest. "Your name was Bram Ashworth. You had a mate. Two children. Forty years ago, someone took them from you, and I
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They spent the rest of the night in Fern's small cabin, going through old pack records by lamplight, searching for any name that might explain what they'd just seen in the trees."There," Fern said finally, tapping a yellowed page with one thin finger. "Bram Ashworth. Lost his entire family in a border raid forty years ago — mate, two pups, all of it, in a single night. He disappeared into the woods a week later. We assumed he'd died out there, grieving alone. Nobody ever found a body.""Forty years is a long time to survive alone in the woods," Kade said."It's not surviving," Fern said quietly. "Not really. Whatever's left of Bram hasn't been alive in any way that word usually means for a very long time. He's just been out there, hollowing further and further, waiting for something to finally fill the emptiness or finish him off."Ivy looked at the old photograph tucked into the record — a young man, smiling, arm around a woman Ivy assumed was his mate, two small children at their f
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