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Chapter 23
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10.09.2026 16:49:33Corin wouldn't talk. Not at first, not even after an hour of Odalys speaking to him low and fast in a language Ivy didn't understand a word of, her voice shifting between pleading and furious and back again.
"He answers to someone named Thorne," Odalys said finally, straightening, exhaustion carved deep into her face. "A faction within what's left of our people. Younger, angrier, tired of waiting for diplomacy to hand back what was taken by force."
"Taken back how?" Kade asked.
"Thorne doesn't believe Ashgrove needs Voss permission to exist again. He believes it needs Voss territory. All of it, eventually, starting with whatever leverage this child represents." Odalys's jaw tightened. "I thought I'd convinced the faction to wait. I was wrong. Corin here was sent to make sure the challenge fight ends in enough chaos that Thorne's people can move while everyone's distracted watching Damon and Kade try to kill each other."
Ivy's stomach turned to ice. "Move how? Move where?"
"Toward you," Odalys said quietly. "And the child. Thorne doesn't see you as someone to protect, Ivy. He sees you as a claim to be secured. A symbol he can use to rally the rest of Ashgrove around him, whether you consent to it or not."
The room went very quiet.
"So during the fight," Kade said slowly, "while I'm trying to keep this pack from falling to Damon, someone's going to try to take Ivy."
"That's my fear, yes."
"Then we change the plan." Kade turned to Rhys, voice hard and fast now, already three steps ahead. "Double security around Ivy, starting tonight, not just during the fight. Nobody gets near her I haven't personally cleared."
"That's not enough," Odalys said. "Thorne's people will expect security. They'll plan around it. What you need is someone who can feel them coming before they're close enough to matter."
Every eye in the room turned toward Ivy.
"Me," she said slowly. "You want me to use whatever this is. During the actual fight."
"I want you safe," Kade said immediately. "That's not the same thing as putting you in the middle of—"
"I'm already in the middle of it, Kade. I have been since the day I signed that contract." Ivy stood, feeling steadier than she probably had any right to feel. "If Thorne's people are going to come for me regardless of what precautions you take, I'd rather be able to feel them coming than sit somewhere safe and helpless, waiting to find out if the precautions worked."
"It's dangerous."
"Everything about this month has been dangerous." She met his eyes, steady. "I'd rather be dangerous back."
They found her an hour before moonrise, alone in the garden where she'd first met Damon, trying to settle the buzzing static that had been building under her skin all evening.
A woman waited by the roses. Not Odalys. Someone younger, hard-eyed, a symbol tattooed along her collarbone that matched the crescent-and-tree from the pendant exactly.
"You're not supposed to be here," Ivy said, that new awareness already screaming a warning she hadn't needed it to give her.
"I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be." The woman's voice was calm, almost gentle, which made it worse. "Thorne sent me ahead. Not to hurt you. To offer you a choice before things get complicated tonight."
"I'm not interested."
"You will be, once you hear it." The woman stepped closer, unhurried. "Come with me now, quietly, before the fighting starts. Thorne will protect you and the child properly — not as some bargaining chip in Voss politics, but as what you actually are. Ashgrove blood, finally coming home."
"This is my home. Right here."
"Is it?" The woman tilted her head, something almost pitying in her expression. "A week ago you didn't know any of this existed. A week from now, if Damon wins that fight, you'll be a widow's problem in someone else's pack, carrying a child nobody there will want alive. Thorne is offering you certainty. Voss is offering you a coin flip."
Ivy felt the pull of her own new instincts sharpen, that low hum turning into something closer to alarm, and somewhere behind the woman, in the shadows past the garden wall, she felt more of them. Not one. Several.
"You're not here to ask," Ivy said slowly, understanding landing cold and clear all at once. "You're here to take me either way. The choice was never real."
The woman's calm expression didn't change, which was its own kind of answer.
"I was hoping you'd make this easy," she said, and reached for something at her belt. "It's a shame you didn't."
Aktuellstes Kapitel
The Alpha's Plump mate Chapter Forty-Three
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
The Alpha's Plump mate Chapter Forty-Two
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
The Alpha's Plump mate Chapter 41
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
The Alpha's Plump mate Chapter 40
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
The Alpha's Plump mate Chapter 38
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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