Chapter 4

Chapter Four

Ivy'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 move in the other direction.

My wolf was restless inside me, pacing low and quiet, a soft continuous growl that wasn't aggression. 

I pulled the small medical kit from my bag. I always carried one when I came here. The path to my mother's grave was uneven and overgrown and I had twisted my ankle on it more than once. I crouched a few feet away from him first, just watching, trying to get a read on how conscious he actually was.

Even with his face half in shadow and with that much blood soaked into his clothes, I could see the shift happen the moment I got close. His body stiffened. One hand pressed harder into the dirt.

 His head turned toward me slowly, and through whatever haze of pain and blood loss he was under, he barely looked at me and made a sound low in his throat. 

It was a warning. Rough and weak but unmistakably deliberate. 

I stayed where I was. "I'm not going to hurt you," I said. "I'm just going to stop the bleeding."

He made the sound again. Deeper this time, and even half-conscious and unable to lift himself off the ground, the force of it went through my chest like a bass note through thin walls. My legs nearly gave out. 

I pressed my hand flat against the tree beside me, steadied myself, and kept moving toward him.

"I know," I said, more to myself than to him. "I know….Just stay still."

His presence was overwhelming even like this, not even Noah had such effects and aura. I had lived with an Alpha for five years. I knew what dominance felt like in a room. 

I pushed the thought aside and focused on the wound.

It was bad. Deep, like something had torn rather than cut, and he had lost a significant amount of blood before I got to him. I worked quickly, pressing the gauze firm against the worst of it, wrapping what I could reach with the bandaging in the kit, keeping my hands steady through the second low roar that rolled out of him when I applied pressure. This one nearly took me off my knees. I gripped his shirt and held on and kept pressing.

"You're going to be fine," I told him, even though I wasn't certain. "You're too stubborn not to be."

I didn't consider taking him home. I had enough troubles to add to it. 

I found the cemetery keeper in his small stone hut at the entrance of the grounds, right where he always was just before dark, wrapping herbs and muttering to himself. Benno. "There's an injured man in the trees past the east path," I said. "He's bad but stable for now. Someone tore into him."

Benno set down his herbs slowly and looked at me. "How bad?"

"He needs shelter and time. Not a hospital, if he wanted a hospital he would have gone to one." I paused. "He has a strong wolf. He'll survive if the bleeding stays stopped."

Benno was quiet for a moment and then stood up without any further questions. He reached for his coat and the worn leather satchel he kept stocked with more knowledge than most pack healers. "I'll check him out."

"Don't tell him I was there," I said. "Don't tell anyone please, I just can't bear to see him bleeding out near my mother's cemetery"

He looked at me with those calm old eyes and smirked. "You were never here."

I walked back to the main road and called Sera for a ride and didn't mention the man in the trees.

***

I woke up the next morning to my phone buzzing on the nightstand.

A group chat notification. Three members. Myself, Mrs. Holt who managed Noah's household, and Amy.

I sat up in bed in Sera's spare room, hair loose around my face, and I stared at it for a moment before I opened it.

Mrs. Holt had sent a message at six in the morning: Miss Amy isn't feeling well this morning. She's been asking about the soup again. Alpha Noah wanted us to reach out.

Then Amy, forty minutes later, with a sad-face emoji: I know it's a lot to ask. I just haven't been able to eat properly. The soup you made last time was the only thing that helped my stomach. But I understand if you don't want to.

I set the phone face down on the mattress and lay there staring at the ceiling.

I knew this game. I had played it before and lost badly.

Eight months ago, I had brought a flask of slow-cooked bone broth to Noah's study because he had been working late and hadn't eaten. He wasn't there when I arrived. Amy was, curled up on the reading chair in one of his sweaters, and she had looked at the flask with such genuine longing that I had, stupidly, told her to help herself. She drank the whole thing in one sitting and looked at me afterward with those soft eyes and said, "I've never had anything like this. You're so talented, Ivy. I wish I could have this every day."

I should have laughed and walked out. Instead I said nothing, and two days later Noah came to me and said Amy's appetite had been suffering because of her illness and that the soup had been the first thing to help and could I make it a few more times. Just a few times. Just until she was stronger.

I said no. I was eight months pregnant. I had my own health to manage, my own body that was running on almost no pheromone support, and I was not going to become a private cook for the woman my husband was in love with.

Amy was admitted to the hospital unconscious that same night.

They pumped her stomach. They called it a crisis episode. Noah called me from the hospital at two in the morning, his voice so cold it had no temperature at all, and said, "She left a note. It says she knows she's not worthy of anyone's kindness. That since she's dying anyway, why should anyone bother." He paused. "She's asking about you specifically, Ivy. I need you to think very carefully about the kind of person you want to be."

She recovered in two days. Sent home bright-eyed and quiet and wearing the expression of someone who had narrowly survived something terrible. The pack found out and I spent a week being looked at in halls and corridors like I was something that had crawled out from under something. Noah didn't come home for eleven days after that. Eleven days with no pheromones, my son growing inside me, my body going into low-grade distress that the doctors said was manageable but concerning. 

I held out for as long as I could before my hands started shaking in my sleep and I woke up one night in a cold sweat with my son barely moving inside me.

I called Noah. He picked up on the second ring, which told me everything — he had been waiting for me to break. "Are you ready to apologize?" he said. That was it, Not are you okay or how is the baby. Just are you ready to apologize.

I apologized. I went to Amy's room in Noah's house and I apologized while she sat in bed with a cup of tea and looked at me with something that wasn't quite guilt and wasn't quite satisfaction either, something that existed in the careful space between the two. And then I cooked for her every day for the next eight weeks until the night of the banquet, because my son's life was not something I was willing to gamble with but my son was gone now.

I picked my phone back up.

The group chat was still open. Amy's message sitting there with its sad-face emoji and its perfectly worded helplessness. I understand if you don't want to.

I typed one message, slow and deliberate, and read it back once before I sent it. "You were right back then. You are indeed not worthy."

I pressed send…Then I left the group.