Chapter 22

Training started at dawn, and Ivy watched most of it from the edge of the yard, wrapped in a blanket against the morning cold, unable to make herself look away even when it got hard to watch.

Kade moved differently than she'd seen him move before — sharper, faster, none of the careful stillness he usually carried into every room. Rhys ran him through drills for hours, correcting his footwork, calling out weaknesses in a voice that had lost all its easy charm from breakfast that first morning.

"You're dropping your shoulder before every strike," Rhys called out, for what felt like the tenth time. "The mercenary's footage shows Damon's picked up the same habit from him. If you can read it in Damon the way I'm reading it in you right now, you'll see the opening before he throws the punch."

"Easy to say from over there."

"Everything's easy to say from over here," Rhys agreed. "Doesn't make it wrong."

Ivy watched them run the same drill another dozen times, watched Kade's form tighten with each repetition, and felt something strange stir low in her chest that had nothing to do with worry.

She could feel it. Not see it, exactly — feel it, the same way she'd felt the pull toward Kade that first night in the clearing. A kind of awareness, sharpening the longer she watched, like she was starting to sense the shape of the fight before it happened.

"You feel that?" Odalys's voice came from behind her, quiet, and Ivy startled hard enough to nearly drop the blanket.

"Feel what?"

"Whatever just moved across your face." Odalys settled onto the bench beside her, eyes tracking Kade and Rhys across the yard. "Ashgrove blood doesn't always show itself the way Voss blood does. No claws, no change under the moon, not for most of us. But awareness — sensing danger before it arrives, reading the shape of a fight before the first strike lands — that's older than the change itself. Older than most packs, if the old stories are true."

"I didn't ask for any of this."

"Neither did your grandmother," Odalys said. "It came to her anyway. It's coming to you now, faster than it should, likely because of the bond you're carrying." She studied Ivy's face, something gentler in her expression than Ivy had seen from her yet. "You could learn to use it. Properly, with guidance, rather than letting it surface on its own the way it's clearly been doing since that clearing."

Ivy looked back toward Kade, watching him take a hit he should have seen coming, watching Rhys call out the correction a half second too late to matter.

"Teach me," she said. "Whatever it is. However long it takes. I want to be able to use it before the full moon, not after."

"Two days isn't much time to learn something most Ashgrove children spend years developing."

"It's the time I've got."

Odalys studied her a long moment, then nodded once, sharp and decisive. "Then we start now. Close your eyes. Tell me what you feel, not what you see."

By evening, Ivy's head ached with the effort of it, but something had shifted — a low, steady hum at the edge of her awareness that hadn't been there yesterday, a sense of the yard around her that went beyond what her eyes alone could give her.

She was walking back toward the house, mind still half in the training, when the hum sharpened into something wrong.

She stopped walking. Listened, or felt, or whatever this new sense actually was.

Someone was near the equipment shed. Someone who didn't belong there.

"Rhys." Her voice came out low, urgent, surprising herself with how certain she sounded. "Someone's at the equipment shed. I don't think it's pack."

Rhys was moving before she'd finished the sentence, Kade half a step behind him, both of them crossing the yard fast and silent. Ivy followed at a distance, heart hammering, that strange new awareness pulling tight in her chest like a wire drawn taut.

They found the shed door cracked open, a figure crouched inside near the equipment used for the challenge fight itself — the ceremonial blades kept for the old rituals, untouched for years, stored for tradition rather than actual use.

The figure bolted the second the door swung wider, but Rhys was faster this time, tackling him hard into the dirt before he'd made it three steps.

It was the same man from Ivy's mother's house. The same dark clothes, the same panicked eyes, pinned now under Rhys's weight with nowhere left to run.

Kade crouched beside him, voice gone dangerously quiet. "What were you doing in there."

The man said nothing, jaw clenched, eyes darting toward Ivy like he was more afraid of something else than he was of Kade.

"He wasn't after the challenge equipment," Ivy said slowly, that new awareness sharpening into something almost like certainty. "He's Ashgrove. I can feel it. He's not working for Damon at all."

Odalys arrived a moment later, breathless, and went very still the second she saw the man's face clearly.

"Corin," she said, something sharp and furious moving across her ancient features. "I told you to wait. I told all of you to wait."

"Wait for what?" Kade demanded.

Odalys's jaw tightened, and for the first time since Ivy had met her, she looked genuinely uncertain how much to say.

"Not everyone in what's left of Ashgrove agrees with my patience," she said finally. "Some of us think sixty-one years of waiting is more than enough. Some of us came here with a very different plan for how this month should end."