Chapter 12

"I need to tell you something," Ivy said, before Rhys had even finished shutting the door behind him. "And I need you to actually hear it before you react."

Kade, who'd been three steps down the hallway, turned back at the sound of her voice through the open door.

"What's wrong?"

"Come back in. Please."

He came back in. Rhys stayed by the door, arms crossed, clearly not planning to leave either.

Ivy told him everything. The intake form. The registry Priya wasn't supposed to look into. The name close enough to her grandmother's to not be a coincidence. A woman cast out sixty years ago for marrying a human, records altered, a story nobody in her family had ever wanted to finish telling.

Kade sat very still through all of it, and Ivy watched something shift behind his eyes as the pieces started fitting together.

"That's why it only took once," he said quietly, more to himself than to her. "That's why the flag showed up at all. You're not just a mate. You're pack blood, buried deep enough that nobody thought to look."

"Priya thinks Damon might find the same registry. If he hasn't already."

"He has." Rhys's voice was flat. "That's what the archive pull was for tonight. He wasn't fishing for anything about the bond. He already knew that much from the council. He's building a legitimacy case."

"Legitimacy," Ivy repeated. "Meaning what, exactly?"

Kade's jaw tightened. "Meaning if he can prove your bloodline was cast out and stripped of standing, he can argue your child doesn't have a clean claim to inherit through you at all. Not fully human, not fully recognized pack — caught in between, legally. It's happened before. It's ugly, and it's slow, and it's exactly the kind of fight Damon's good at."

"Can he actually win that?"

"I don't know," Kade admitted. "Nobody's tested that argument in decades. Which means whoever argues it first basically gets to decide what the rule means."

The room went quiet. Somewhere outside, wind moved through the trees, and Ivy found herself thinking, absurdly, about how normal that sounded compared to everything else happening in this house.

"And Elena," Ivy said. "Rhys said she left. Said nobody's heard from her."

"She's not answering her phone," Rhys said. "Which either means she's somewhere with no signal, or she doesn't want to be found right now."

"You think she's with Damon."

"I think," Rhys said carefully, "that she's spent three years watching a life she thought was hers get handed to someone else, and Damon's very good at finding people who are hurting and giving them a reason to feel useful again."

Kade stood, paced once to the window and back, hands pressed flat against the back of his neck like he was trying to hold his own head together by force.

"I need to talk to her before Damon gets any further ahead of us," he said. "Tonight, if I can find her."

"That's exactly what he wants," Rhys said. "You chasing after Elena in the middle of the night, leaving Ivy alone here again, right after the last time you left the property blew up in your face."

Kade stopped pacing.

"He's right," Ivy said, quiet. "You can't leave. Not tonight."

"Then what do you want me to do? Sit here and wait for him to file whatever he's building?"

"I want you to let me help." Ivy stood, steadier than she'd expected to feel given everything. "It's my bloodline he's trying to use against us. I should be part of figuring out how to fight it, not sitting in this room waiting to find out what everyone decided without me."

Something in Kade's face softened, just slightly, the same look he'd given her in the clearing right before the change took him.

"Okay," he said. "Together, then."

A knock at the door cut through whatever came next. Sharp. Formal. Not Rhys's knock, not Elena's.

Rhys opened it to find a young pack member standing stiff in the hallway, an envelope held out in both hands like it might bite him.

"For the alpha," the messenger said. "From the council clerk. Marked urgent."

Kade took it, broke the seal, and Ivy watched his face go pale as he read.

"What is it?" she asked.

He didn't answer right away. He just turned the paper around so she could see it herself — a formal notice, dense with legal language, one line circled in red ink at the bottom.

Legitimacy Hearing scheduled. Three days' time. All parties required to attend.