MasukIvy's POVI was halfway through lifting my glass of water to my mouth and sitting down on another chair when Liam's voice cut through the entire dining room like a blade."Don't you dare."Everyone went still. The conversations, the clinking, the soft sounds of a room full of people eating — all of it stopped in the space of one breath. I set my glass down slowly and watched him.He was looking at Tulip."Get up." His voice had dropped into that register, the low Alpha command that did not need volume to fill a room because it filled something deeper than the room. It filled the air itself.Tulip looked up at him with something genuinely surprised moving across her face, like she had expected him to walk in and soften the moment he saw her. "Liam…" Her voice came out careful, coaxing, the voice of someone who had used it on him before. "It has been so long. I missed you. I just wanted to be close, I did not think—""Get the hell off that chair."She blinked. Her mouth opened and the
Ivy's POVI smiled at her, nodded once, and walked away.That was all I had left in me. A smile that did not reach anything and a nod that meant nothing and two legs that carried me down the corridor and through the door of my room before the first crack in my chest had time to widen into something I could not close again. I sat on the edge of the bed in my green dress and I pressed my hands flat on my thighs and I breathed.My wolf curled tight inside me. She did not say anything. She just pressed herself close to the walls of my chest and stayed there and that silence from her hurt more than anything Tulip had said with words.I did not know what the worst part was. That Tulip was real. That the mate bond she was describing was real, detailed, specific, the kind of thing you cannot manufacture. That she had described the night Liam was attacked with a precision that only someone who had actually been there could manage. Or that Liam had not looked at me once when he said it means n
Ivy's POVThe meeting ended well.My heart did not.I sat in that chair and watched the hall empty and told myself to breathe normally because Liam was right beside me and I was not going to let him see whatever was happening in my chest right now. My wolf was pacing, slow circles, the way she did when she had picked up on something before I had finished processing it.Tulip was still in the room.She was pretty in a way that was hard to dismiss. Not sharp or deliberate the way Amy had been pretty, performing it, wearing it like armour. Tulip was pretty the way some women just are, naturally, effortlessly, the kind of pretty that does not need a mirror to confirm itself. She was thick through the hips, full
Liam's POV"On the grounds of bearing false witness against a sitting Alpha King, corruption of Council process, bribery of a Council member, and orchestrating the deliberate poisoning of an Alpha to suppress a mate bond." Luka's voice did not waver once. "You are hereby stripped of your Alpha title. Removed from leadership of your pack with immediate effect. Your title, your seat, your authority, all of it is revoked."Noah laughed. An actual laugh, short and sharp, the laugh of a man who thinks the punchline is coming and he already knows it."That will not hold." He looked around the room like he was waiting for someone to agree with him. "That will not hold, there is not a court in this territory that will enforce that, you cannot strip a born Alpha of his—"The men came through the side entrance with the iron cuffs.Noah's laugh stopped.He looked at
Liam's POVMy eyes found Tulip the second she walked through that door and the first thing I felt was not warmth. It was irritation. Deep, controlled, what the fuck are you doing here irritation that I had to keep completely off my face because fifty people were watching mine.My father had handled this. That was the arrangement. Tulip was supposed to stay low, stay quiet, stay out of anything with my name on it until the timing was right. She was not supposed to walk into my hall, in front of the High Council, in front of Ivy, and detonate everything at once.I looked at Ivy.She had gone pale and it's not dramatically, not the kind of pale that makes a room notice. The quiet kind, where the colour drains slowly from beneath the skin and the person sits very still and keeps their face exactly where they put it because they are not going to let anyone see what is happening underneath. I knew that face. I had spent months learning that face. I moved my hand under the table and found
Ivy's POVMy hands were flat on the table and I was pressing them down hard because if I did not, they were going to shake and I was not going to give this room that.Luka's words were still sitting in the air. Step down with immediate effect. They had landed somewhere in my chest like something cold dropped from a height and I was still feeling the weight of them when Liam laughed and everything in the hall changed.My wolf growled low inside me.Stay still, I told her. Not yet.She held but I felt her restless, coiled, unhappy about being made to wait.Liam rose from his chair. Not dramatically, not with a performance of it, just stood up slowly the way a storm gathers, and when he was fully upright the room felt like it had shrunk. He looked at Luka with that particular stillness that I had come to understand meant he was at his most dangerous and then he let it go."Where were you?" His voice filled every corner of that hall without effort. "Where was this Council when my wife was
Ivy's POVI made it through the bath without embarrassing myself…barely.Liam had been careful and deliberate. Every touch measured and controlled like he was running a clinical operation and not sitting in a bathtub with his hands on my skin, and I sat very still and kept my mouth shut and told my
Ivy's POVDid he think he was talking to a five year old?Because I was standing here, or sitting here, technically, in steaming water with chain marks on my wrists and a bruise the size of a fist spreading across my jaw and Liam was looking at me waiting for an answer and the only coherent thought
Ivy's POVDelinda was already talking before we even fully crossed the threshold.She was standing dead center in the corridor, arms folded, chin lifted, dressed like she had been waiting for this exact moment and had rehearsed it three times in front of a mirror. Beautiful in the specific way that
Ivy's POVThe roar didn't stop.It kept going, rolling through the trees and across the water and into my chest and I felt it in my teeth and Amy's hands went slack on my chains and the women holding me started shaking so visibly I could feel it through the iron links and the river was cold against







