Dumped the Alpha, Mated to the Lycan

Ivy POV

"Choose." The rogue's arm locks across my throat. "One walks. One stays."

Julian stands twenty feet away. His eyes move to Selena, then to me, then back to Selena.

"Selena."

One word. No pause. Like the answer had already been sitting in his mouth before the rogue even finished asking.

The rogue releases her. Julian steps forward and catches her, both hands on her arms, pulling her in. She says his name against his chest. He answers her quietly, his head tilting down toward hers. He doesn't look back at me once.

Sylvie slams against my ribs so hard I lose my breath.

I press my fist to my sternum. I breathe. I make myself breathe slow and even, the way my father taught me when I was small and scared and didn't want anyone to see it.

'He'll send someone back,' I think. 'He always has a plan.'

But even as I think it, I know what I saw. I saw his eyes move from Selena to me, and I saw the exact moment he made his choice, and it took less than a second. It took less than a second for him to decide which one of us mattered. Three years of showing up, of being useful, of asking for nothing, and when it came down to it, when someone put a gun to the question and demanded an answer, the answer came out of his mouth before he even had to think.

Sylvie throws herself against my ribs again. I hold her. I hold both of us still.

'Someone will come,' I tell her. 'Wait.'

She doesn't believe me. I'm not sure I believe me either.

The rogue's fist catches the side of my head. Everything cuts out.

Stone floor. No window. The cold here isn't sharp, it's the kind that settles into walls and stays. I sit with my back against the stone and pull my knees up.

Sylvie paces inside my mind, tight anxious circles. I breathe until she slows.

Nobody comes.

I hear the battle pick back up above me at some point. Wolves shifting, bodies hitting the ground, a howl cut short. Then the sounds change, rogues running, scattering, Silvercrest driving them out. I try to stand. My legs buckle. The cold has been in my joints for hours without me noticing. I slide back down the wall and wait.

When they find me I'm already on the ground. A warrior crouches over me and says my name, then says it louder. I can't get my mouth to work. I hear him shout for backup, and then the world tips sideways and I stop tracking it.

I know where I am before I open my eyes. Wolfsbane compound. Dried herbs. The medicinal smell of the pack doctor's room. Someone has put a heated blanket over me. Gray light through a small window.

Voices outside the door. I don't move, just listen.

Julian's voice is among them.

Sylvie stirs. And before I can stop it, before I can remind myself of the clearing and the single word he said without flinching, something in my chest lifts. Some stupid, persistent, three-year-old thing that apparently one night in a frozen cell wasn't enough to kill.

I'm so tired of that feeling.

The door opens. Julian comes in still wearing his outdoor coat, snow damp on the shoulders. He looks around the room first, then at the window, then finally at me. He walks to the window and stands there with his hands in his pockets, his back mostly turned.

"You should have been found sooner," he says. "There was confusion during the retreat. By the time someone ran a full headcount—"

He stops. Doesn't finish the sentence. Doesn't apologize for what the unfinished sentence means.

I watch the back of his coat and say nothing.

He turns slightly. "Selena is fine. Bruised, but resting."

There it is.

I spent a night in a cell that smelled like rot. I woke up in a pack doctor's room with a bruise along my jaw and no feeling in my hands. And the sentence Julian came in here to give me is that Selena is fine.

"Good," I say.

He turns all the way around at that. Looks at me directly. I hold it. I don't smooth my face out, don't give him the small reassuring nod that means I'm not going to make this hard for you. I have given him that nod so many times. I know exactly what he came in here for.

He's not getting it today.

Julian shifts his weight. "The pack doctor wants you here another day. The cold exposure, the head injury." He pauses. "You should rest."

"I know what the pack doctor said."

He nods once, short and uncomfortable, and walks out. The door clicks shut behind him.

I sit with the quiet he leaves.

He came in here and gave me a status update on Selena. He stood at my window with his back turned and told me to rest. That is the whole of what he has for me after a night in a frozen cell. Not I'm sorry. Not I should have made sure you were out first. Just Selena is fine, rest, the door clicking shut.

I think about three years ago. I was sixteen, standing outside this pack's main hall with a blood-sealed document clutched against my chest, my palms so damp I was scared of leaving marks on the paper. My father two months dead. Highmoor Pack gone. One thing left, the alliance agreement his father had signed when both our families still meant something.

I knew it didn't obligate Julian to anything. I knew he could turn me away at the door. I went in anyway, because my father's last letter said to try.

Julian came out to meet me himself. I hadn't expected that.

I held the document out and made my hands stop shaking. "If you want to refuse," I said, "I won't make it hard for you."

He looked at the document. He looked at me. "The agreement stands."

I built something on top of those four words. I told myself the kind of man who honors a promise when he has every reason to walk away must be worth trusting. I told myself the way my chest felt when he said it meant something real.

Three years. I spent all of it finding out what that actually meant.

Now Julian comes into a room where I've been half-frozen and forgotten, and what he gives me is Selena is fine. And the thing in my chest that used to lift when I heard his voice doesn't lift this time.

It just goes quiet.

Sylvie goes quiet with it.

I reach for my phone on the side table. Seven missed messages. None from Julian. One from my grandmother, sent three hours ago: Ivy. Call me when you can.

I call her.

She picks up on the second ring. "Ivy. Thank the Moon. Are you hurt?"

"I'm fine." My voice comes out steady. "Evelyn, I need to tell you something."

"Tell me."

"I'm filing for Severance." First time I've said it out loud. My chest doesn't seize up. My voice doesn't waver. "I've decided. I'm ending the contract."

A silence. Then a slow exhale. "I know," she says quietly. "I've known for a while. I just didn't want to push you before you were ready."

"I should have been ready sooner."

"You're ready now." Her voice is warm and steady and nothing like the pack doctor's room. "Come home when you can. We'll figure out the rest together."

I hang up. The screen is still lit, and I catch my own reflection in it, hair loose, face pale, the bruise along my jaw already darkening from the rogue's fist. I stare at it for a long moment.

Three years in this pack, and this is what I look like. Someone who got left in a cell while everyone else moved on and forgot she was there.

Outside the snow falls slow and indifferent, somewhere in this building, Julian is with Selena. Talking to her in that low careful voice I have heard through walls every night and never once heard directed at me. I used to lie awake and let that fact carve into me. Right now I feel it like a door swinging shut. Like something that no longer has a way in.

I close my eyes.My body is starting to find some warmth again, slowly, from the fingers upward. I don't know how long I sleep. When I surface, the light through the window has shifted, and the hallway outside has gone quiet.

Then I hear footsteps.

Not the pack doctor. Not Julian. These are deliberate, light enough to seem careful, but not so light that they can't be heard. I know exactly whose footsteps these are.

The door opens.

"Oh, you're awake." Selena's voice, carrying just a thread of sweetness. "I came to check on you."