ログインIvy's POVThe rage that moved through me was so clean and so complete that my hands stopped shaking entirely."What contract?" I said. "What the hell are you even talking about, Noah? What silly little document did you cook up in your office after I left? Because I will tell you exactly what I remember signing and it was not that.""Ivy—""And another thing." I stepped forward and the room went quiet enough that I could hear my own voice clearly. "I was never even your mate. You chose me. It wasn't the bond, it wasn't fate, it wasn't the goddess deciding we belonged together. You chose me and then you spent two years treating me like a consolation prize while you kept your first love warm in my home." I looked him dead in the eyes. "So whatever authority that contract thinks it has over me, it was built on a foundation you already destroyed. You don't get to show up here and wave paper at me like I'm property you misplaced."Noah laughed. The audacity of it made my blood boil. "Ther
Ivy's POVI was way too shock at the sudden scene. Shocked was too small and too clean a word for what happened to my body the moment Noah's voice cut through that room. Every muscle locked. My lungs stopped working for a full three seconds and the only thing I could actually feel was Liam's hand, tight around mine, a grip that said stay right here without a single word.The room had erupted. All of it at once, hundreds of voices crashing into each other, some outraged, some confused, some just feeding off the chaos, and I stood in the middle of it with my wedding dress and my new title and my ex-husband standing twenty feet away dismantling everything with his mouth."Don't," Liam said quietly beside me. Just that. One word, low and absolute."I'm not doing anything.""Your face is doing something." His grip tightened slightly. "Let me handle it."I wanted to believe him. I genuinely wanted to and the fact that I almost did scared me more than Noah being in the room.Liam let go of
Liam's POVEverything was happening so fast and I wanted that to happen because the full moon is going to be in a week's time and there is a lot of pending stuff that needs to happen. Now my sister is back, Maxine is staring at me as if I committed a huge crime and my friend Kel, whom I have always wanted him to be my beta, was suddenly here with me because he was managing the other five pack territories which were causing chaos and now he's back. He was looking at me like I had three heads and I groaned"Stop staring at me."Maxine and Kel both continued staring at me."I will crush both your necks.""You won't," Maxine said cheerfully. "You love me too much."Kel hadn't said anything yet. He'd walked back from the eastern territories two hours ago looking like he'd been through five different kinds of hell and the first thing he'd done after dropping his bag was find me and stare. Just stare. Like I had grown a second head and he was still deciding if it was real."Kel," I said."Li
Ivy's POVThe meeting was a disaster. A beautiful, controlled disaster that I walked out of with my spine straight and my face neutral and the moment the doors closed behind me my legs almost gave out because thirty-two of the most powerful men in lycan history had spent two hours deciding with their eyes that I was an insult to everything they had built and if Liam's presence hadn't been a physical force in that room they would have torn me apart with their bare hands and felt completely justified doing it.I didn't care. That was the thing I kept telling myself in the corridor walking back to my room.I didn't care because I had survived worse with fewer resources and no authority behind me and now I had half the authority of the most powerful lycan alive and a contract that hadn't been signed yet but would be and until then I had his word and his word in this pack was law.I believed that. I actually believed it and that scared me more than the thirty-two men had.I pushed my door
Noah's POV"Nothing, Alpha." Dax stood in front of my desk with his hands behind his back and the expression he wore when delivering news he already knew I wasn't going to take well. "I've checked every territory within a hundred miles. Every contact, every border checkpoint, every inn and safe house. It's like she vanished overnight.""People don't vanish overnight.""Ivy apparently did because she's nowhere to be found."I turned away from him and looked out the window and pressed my knuckles against the glass and tried to think past the frustration that had been sitting in my chest for three days now like a stone I couldn't shift. Ivy had nobody. That was the thing I kept coming back to. Her mother was dead. Her friend Stephanie claimed ignorance and kept claiming it despite every form of pressure Dax had applied, which meant Stephanie knew something and was choosing silence, but even Stephanie didn't leave the territory which meant Ivy hadn't gone to her.She had a cottage. A tin
Ivy's POVWas I making a mistake?The question had been sitting in my chest since the moment I nodded and it hadn't moved. I stood in front of the mirror while my two new maids, Sena and Bree, fussed with my hair and my dress and chattered softly about how the whole pack was buzzing, how nobody had seen this coming, how the announcement had spread through all thirty-two territories in under an hour, and I stared at my own reflection and thought about Noah.Noah had tried for years to get an audience with the Lycan King. Years. Letters sent, representatives dispatched, alliances offered, every channel he had worked, and not one of them ever made it past the front gate of Blue Elite. I had written letters myself in the first year of our mating, trying to build connections for the pack, and they had disappeared into the same silence.And here I was. About to walk into a meeting with thirty-two territory elders as Liam's Luna.The mate bond doesn't make you strong, Ivy. You do.I didn't k
Ivy's POVI looked at Caius and I was done. Just done. Every single bully I had ever encountered, every person who had looked at me and decided I was beneath them, every voice that had told me I was nothing, they all lived in his face right now and I was so completely exhausted of it that I didn't
Liam's POVCaius leaned against the doorframe with both arms crossed and that particular look on his face, the one that said he had already decided how this conversation was going to go and was looking forward to every second of it. His eyes moved from me to Ivy and back again and the slow smile tha
Ivy's POVHis eyes moved over me slowly and I watched the anger move through him like a current. Not loud or explosive. His eyes burning gold at the edges, and he was staring at my leg, at the angle of it, at the torn skin on my arms and hands, and every second he stared his breathing got slower an
Liam's POVAn older woman at the back of the hall broke first."Please, Alpha." Her voice cracked loud across the silence. "It's Yara and Nana. Please don't banish the rest of us. We've been here for years, we've given everything to Blue Elite, and if we leave as rogues they will kill us. Please."







