Chapter Four

IVY’S POV

The screams had faded, but they echoed in my bones.

Smoke clung to the sky like mourning veils, thick and unrelenting, curling into the hollow spaces of my lungs. I stood there in the ruins of everything I had ever known, though calling it a life felt like a stretch. The Silver Crest Pack lay in shambles behind me, reduced to ash and soot, flame and silence. Only hours ago, it had been alive with cruelty. With rules. With barking orders and bruises that never quite faded.

Now it burned.

I should have felt something.

Maybe like a relief, asurge of Justice or even guilt for not caring that they were dead. But I felt nothing. Nothing but the weight of exhaustion pressing into my spine and the scent of charred flesh baking into my skin. My knees were bleeding from falling again and my dress, that same tattered thing I’d worn for nearly a year, had caught a lick of flame near the hem. I hadn’t noticed until the fire died out on its own.

I was still.

Still as stone, as ghosts, as bones buried beneath old blood.

They were dead. All of them. The elders, the warriors, the omegas who had sneered at me even while suffering beside me.

I was alone.

I didn’t move. I just stared at the world falling apart in front of me and behind me and inside me.

And then he came.

A figure emerged from the smoke like a creature out of one of those old nightmare stories whispered by kitchen fires, only that this one was real. The closer he stepped, the more my chest locked. The flames behind him made him look almost inhuman, his silhouette outlined in fire and shadow, framed by warriors moving in practiced formation.

Kane Blackwood.

Of course, I didn’t know his name yet, but I knew his power. You didn’t need a title to recognize a storm.

He didn’t walk. He prowled. Like death in the skin of a man. And when his eyes locked onto me—cold and pale and carved from ice, I forgot how to breathe. I’d been struck before, kicked, spat on, and starved. But nothing had ever gutted me like that look. Like I was something foreign, something wrong, something… marked.

I should’ve looked away, should’ve dropped to my knees, or even run.

But I couldn’t.

Because he wasn’t just looking at me like I was strange.

He was looking at me like he’d seen me before.

I didn’t understand it.

I didn’t like it.

I hated that his gaze didn’t slide over me like everyone else’s. That he wasn’t laughing or recoiling or barking orders. He was just… watching.

I was confused, furious, and something else I couldn’t name.

The blood on his hands was still fresh. He didn’t try to wipe it off. I imagined it belonged to the elders—the ones who used to remind me daily that I was nothing, that I was cursed, that I was tolerated only because the prophecy forbade my death.

But that prophecy hadn’t saved the pack.

The fire crackled between us. He was maybe ten steps away, but it felt like he was already under my skin.

And then he spoke.

Just one word.

“Take her.”

It rang like a verdict.

At first, no one moved. The warriors behind him looked confused. As if they hadn’t expected a survivor, let alone one he didn’t kill outright.

I blinked. Maybe I’d imagined it.

But then one stepped forward.

Then another.

And I ran.

Not with purpose or hope because I wasn’t fast. I was tired and battered and had nothing left to give. But my body remembered what fear felt like, and it obeyed out of habit. My legs took over, moving through smoke and broken beams and the stench of death.

It didn’t matter. They caught me in seconds.

I screamed, kicked., even bit down on someone’s wrist but none of it mattered. They were too strong and many.

“Let me go!” I shouted, voice tearing through my throat. “Let me burn with them!”

I meant it. I wanted the flames, the peace and the end.

One of them grunted, catching my flailing arms in one brutal motion. “You’re not dying today.”

“Why?” I sobbed, half-crazed. “There’s nothing left. Just let me—”

A sharp jab to my neck silenced everything.

The world tilted.

Colors blurred.

And darkness swallowed me whole.

When I woke, it was not to fire, not to pain. But to a soft and terrifying silence.

I didn’t open my eyes right away. I let the stillness wrap around me, unfamiliar and heavy. The ground beneath me wasn’t the cracked stone floor of the servants’ barracks. It moved. Rumbled softly. A wagon, maybe. I could feel the rhythm of hooves through the wood.

Slowly, I blinked.

There was no sky. Only a rough wooden ceiling. My arms were bound loosely, but enough. A blanket was thrown over me, scratchy but warm. Someone had wrapped it around me while I was unconscious.

The kindness of it was confusing.

I turned my head and winced. My skull throbbed like it had been split in two. Through the wagon’s slats, I saw fading trees, empty hills. Dusk painted everything in bruised purples and pale blue.

Two guards rode on either side of the wagon. Neither glanced my way.

I didn’t speak nor move.

I just… existed. Unsure why I still could.

Where were they taking me?

Why had Kane Blackwood the monster with fire in his wake spared me?

And more importantly… what did he plan to do now that he had me?

The journey took days.

I didn’t know how many. Maybe three. Maybe four. I slept in snatches, woke in fits. They gave me food—simple, tasteless things but I barely ate. My stomach turned every time I tried. The guards didn’t say much. Only gave orders when I moved too suddenly or looked like I might try to run again.

I didn’t because I had nowhere to run to.

Each night, they’d let me out of the wagon to stretch my legs near the campfire. I didn’t talk. Just sat, quiet and small, wrapped in that same scratchy blanket, watching strangers murmur around glowing embers.

Their pack mark wasn’t Silver Crest’s.

A wolf’s head surrounded by a crescent moon.

They are the Nightfalls.

I’d heard whispers of them before—brutal, reclusive, merciless. The kind of pack even rogues feared crossing. No one had ever seen their territory and come back talking.

And now I was being taken there.

As what?

A prisoner? A token? A reminder of what Silver Crest had lost?

I watched the guards as they moved, sharp and alert, but not cruel. They didn’t mock me, didn’t throw things, didn’t treat me like dirt. They treated me like a problem they hadn’t figured out how to solve yet.

That was worse somehow.

I caught my reflection once, just briefly in a still pool beside the road.

I looked like a shadow of a girl.

Eyes too big. Hair tangled. Skin streaked with soot that still hadn’t washed off.

I didn’t recognize myself.

Didn’t know who she was. Or where she belonged.

All I knew was that I didn’t belong with them.

And I never belonged with Silver Crest either.

The dreams started again the second night on the road.

The same ones that had haunted me since I was twelve.

Stars burning, falling, singing in a language I didn’t know.

A woman’s voice, soft and fierce, echoing across a dark sky whispering my name.

Not Ivy, not the way anyone ever said it.

Different like it came from the beginning of something.

She had eyes like mine. That was always the part that hurt the most.

The eyes.

She would reach for me, just as I woke.

And I’d gasp.

This time, when I woke, the stars were real.

I sat in the back of the wagon, alone, the guards taking shifts a few feet away. I stared up at the sky and tried to remember the sound of her voice.

But it was fading again.

Like everything else.

My memories were blank slates beyond seventeen years of pain. No mother’s arms. No first word. No wolf to call my own. Just strange dreams and a voice that didn’t belong in any of the lands I’d known.

The woman in the stars was my only secret. My only truth.

Her eyes were mine.

And I had no idea who she was.

But somehow, I knew the world was changing.

And whatever Kane Blackwood wanted from me…

…would change it even more.