INICIAR SESIÓNIVY He knelt down. Both knees on the floor of the arena exit with council members and pack witnesses still filing out around us. Noah, Alpha of his pack, on his knees in front of me, and not performing it. Not making it dramatic. Just doing it with the quiet certainty of a man who had decided this was what the moment required and was not going to let his ego talk him out of it."All of it," he said quietly. "Every piece of it. I am dropping it here."I felt the tears before I decided to cry. Pressed my fingers to my mouth for a second and breathed through it."I forgave you a long time ago," I said. My voice was steadier than I expected. "The day I arrived in Ironveil and found Liam, I forgave you for all of it. Because if you had not been exactly as cruel as you were, I would never have ended up where I was supposed to be." I looked at him and meant every word. "Because of you I have him. Because of you I have that baby. So I forgive you, Noah. Fully with my whole heart."He exhale
Ivy's POVI ran to him before my brain caught up with my legs.He was walking out of that ring, upright and breathing which should have been enough, that should have been the thing that calmed the storm in my chest, but then I got close enough to see him properly and my legs almost gave out. His shirt was gone somewhere in the fight. His torso was a map of everything that ring had done to him, claw marks, deep ones, dried blood cracking at the edges, one shoulder sitting wrong in a way that made my stomach turn. His face had a cut above his eyebrow that had bled down the side of his face and dried there and he had not even bothered to wipe it.He was still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and I hated him for it."Liam." His name came out of me like something breaking.He turned and found me and everything in his face changed, the authority, the iron that he wore like a second skin, all of it cracked open and underneath it was just a man who had been scared and was only now a
Liam's POVDarian's wolf hit me mid-shift and the world went sideways.We went down together, his jaws at my throat, my body half-changed and fighting itself, and for one second, one genuine second, I thought that was it. That this was the moment the Alpha King of Blue Elite died on the floor of his own arena in front of every witness the council had ever assembled, half-shifted and bleeding from four different places, with his brother's teeth at his neck.Then I heard her voice."Liam!"Everything stopped.But not the fight. The fight kept going, Darian's wolf pressing down, my body still halfway through a shift that had stalled. But something in my chest stopped, snapped to attention the way it only ever did for one person, and I turned my head toward the sound even with jaws at my throat.Ivy was at the edge of the arena. Bloodied, wrists raw, hair everywhere, standing like she had run the entire way here and was still running inside, and her eyes found mine across the ring and she
Liam's POVI coughed blood in the arena as my knees went out. It was enough that it hit the stone floor of the arena and the front row of the crowd went quiet the way people go quiet when they realize what they are watching has stopped being a spectacle and started being something else entirely.Darian had not touched me once.That was the part that sat in my chest worse than the blood. He was standing fifteen feet away with his fingers loose around the relic at his chest, not even gripping it hard, just touching it, and every time he activated it, I felt Balaam fold inward like something being pressed flat. My legs were shaking. My ribs felt like they were breathing wrong. And Darian was looking at me the way you look at a problem you already solved three days ago."That's it?" he said. He tilted his head. "That is genuinely it? The great Alpha King of Blue Elite, the man every pack on this continent has been losing sleep over, and this is what I get?" He clicked his tongue. "I feel
Ivy's POVI was a mess and I knew it.Crying so hard that my chest kept lurching between sobs, snot and tears and no dignity whatsoever, sitting on the floor of that cell with my bound hands pressed to my face like that was going to do anything useful. I had held it together through the car ride, through Darian's face, through everything, and now that I was alone the whole damn thing came crashing down at once.Liam was in that ring. I could feel it pulling at something deep in my chest, the bond doing things I had no language for, tightening in a way that made my ribs ache, and I did not know if he was okay or if Darian had already done whatever he had gone there to do. My wolf had gone quiet and that alone told me everything was not fine.Then the pain ripped through my lower abdomen and I screamed before I could stop myself.It was sharp, vicious, gone almost as fast as it came, but the sound had already left my mouth and now it was just sitting in the air of the dungeon doing exa
Liam's POVI did not sleep.I tried, for about an hour, lying on my back in the dark staring at the ceiling while Balaam circled inside me like something that had forgotten how to be still. The bond was there, thin and stretched but there, and I kept running my hand along it the way you pressed a bruise to confirm it still hurt. She was alive. She was far. She was scared in the way she was always scared, quietly, with her jaw set and her hands steady while everything else in her screamed.I got up before dawn.Rixon was already awake, which meant he had not slept either, and he was sitting at the table in the war room with a mug going cold in front of him and the expression of a man who had been rehearsing an argument since midnight and was read
Chapter FourIvy's Pov I should have walked away. He was a stranger, bleeding out between two trees at the edge of pack territory, and every sensible thought in my head was telling me that a man this badly injured at the border could be a rogue or a criminal trying to flee but my feet wouldn't mov
Ivy's PovAmy's eyes filled with tears so fast it almost looked rehearsed. Her bottom lip trembled and she pressed one hand to her chest like my words had physically wounded her. Every person in that shop was looking at me like I had just kicked a puppy.Noah turned to me with that cold, flat look
Ivy's PovThe door clicked shut behind him and I sat there at that kitchen table staring at the divorce papers still unsigned under my hands, and I thought about how five years of my life had just walked out to go check on another woman without even waiting to hear what I had to say.My phone buzze
Ivy's PovDr. Hayes walked in with his clipboard and that look on his face which made my stomach drop before a single word was spoken, and he sat down in front of me and said, "Mrs. Caldwell, I'm so sorry. The baby could not be saved. We need to perform the induction as soon as possible." He gave m







