Dumped the Alpha, Mated to the Lycan

Ivy POV

The rogues came out of the tree line all at once, six of them, maybe eight. I lost count when the first one hit me from the side and put me on the ground.

"Julian!"

I rolled, got a knee under me, and a second one closed its jaw around my forearm. Pain shot up to my shoulder. I drove my other fist into its eye until it let go and staggered back, snarling.

"Julian, here!"

He was thirty feet away, sword already out. He turned toward my voice, and for half a second I let myself believe he was coming.

He ran past me.

Selena was pinned against a boulder, one rogue snapping at her ankle. Julian tore it off her and threw it into the rocks. He pulled her up by both arms, checked her face, her hands, her throat, one part of her body at a time, like she was made of something precious.

He didn't look back at me once.

A third rogue came in low and I had nothing left to throw at it but myself. Sylvie didn't surge. She hadn't surged in years, not since the night that took her from me. I grabbed a fallen branch and swung it into the nearest skull. Teeth found my arm again, lower this time, and I felt the skin give before I felt the pain.

"Someone help her!" That was a warrior's voice, not Julian's.

I don't know how long it took for the rest of them to arrive. Long enough that my legs stopped holding me on their own, long enough that the world narrowed down to the next swing, the next bite, the next breath. By the time the horns finally sounded and the rogues scattered into the dark, I was on my knees in a pool that I was fairly sure was mine.

A healer got an arm under me and pressed cloth hard against the bite on my shoulder. "Easy. You've lost a lot. Don't try to stand yet."

I let my eyes close for one second. Just one.

"Ivy."

Julian's voice. I opened my eyes and for half a heartbeat let myself hope it meant something.

It didn't. He crouched in front of me and pulled his collar down, showing me the gray creeping along his collarbone, thin lines spreading toward his throat. "It's been three days. I need it now, not after the healers finish playing with bandages."

"I'm bleeding from four places, Julian."

"And I'm in pain." He held out his hand, palm up, and waited the way he always waited, like the answer had never once been in question.

The healer's hands stilled on my shoulder. He didn't say anything. Nobody said anything to an Alpha, not even about his half-dead wife.

"Julian, she needs to rest first," he tried, quiet, careful.

"She'll rest after." Julian didn't even look at him.

I gave Julian my arm.

The healer drew it himself, quick and clinical, filling a small glass vial from the vein at my wrist. Julian didn't wait for a thank-you to occur to him. He took the vial and drank it down in one motion. The gray along his collarbone faded as I watched, color easing back into his face while mine drained out of mine. I had become a thing he kept in working order rather than a person he was married to.

When he finished, he set the empty vial down without a glance and stood. He didn't look at the bandage darkening on my shoulder. He didn't ask if I could walk.

"Get some rest," he said, not looking back. "You look terrible."

That was the closest he came all night to checking on me.

I remembered the first time, six years ago, in a healer's tent that smelled like burnt sage. I'd thrown myself between Julian and a rogue with its jaws already open for his throat, and the bite that should have killed him went into my shoulder instead. I was sixteen.

The healer who closed the wound looked at my mother with the grim face people use right before they ruin your life.

"It's not just her shoulder," he said. "Something's lodged in the boy. Venom this deep doesn't clear on its own, not with herbs, not with time. It takes blood with the old strength still in it. Lancaster blood. Hers specifically, and no one else's will do."

"For how long?" my mother asked.

"For as long as he lives."

Sylvie went quiet inside me that same night, somewhere past the screaming, and she never fully woke up again. No shift since. No howl since. Just a small, dim presence curled at the bottom of me, breathing when I breathed.

My mother's hand found mine and gripped hard enough to hurt. "Do you understand what that means for the rest of your life, Ivy? Every time he needs it. However often that is."

"I understand."

"He won't always remember to ask kindly." She said it like a warning, like she already knew.

I looked across the tent at Julian, bandaged, alive, watching me like I'd handed him something he could never give back. He reached for my hand before either of our mothers could stop him.

"Ivy. I'll marry you, and only you. I swear I'll be good to you for the rest of my life."

"I don't care what it means." I meant it. "I'd do it again."

The marriage contract came two years later, the week I turned eighteen. By then my father and brother were already dead on the eastern border, and my mother followed them into the ground before that winter was out. Nobody was left to ask if a sixteen-year-old's promise still held at eighteen, except a kid brother too young to understand what I'd just signed away. I signed it myself, certain that a husband who owed me his life would spend the rest of his cherishing mine.

I was wrong about that for four straight years. Six, if I counted from the bite. I'm twenty-two now, and not once did Julian say the word thank you. Not tonight either.

By the time I made it back to my room, my arm ached down to the bone and my legs barely held me up the stairs. I sat on the edge of the bed and let myself shake for exactly as long as it took to hear footsteps in the hall.

Selena let herself in without knocking. "I heard you got hurt."

"I'm fine."

"Good." She sat down across from me like we were friends, not once looking at the blood soaked through the bandage on my arm. "Julian was so frightened tonight. Did you see his face when he pulled me out? I've never seen him move that fast for anyone."

"I was there, Selena."

"Of course you were." Her smile didn't move. "He talks about it, you know. How close I came tonight. He couldn't sleep after the last time either, so we sat up most of the night just talking."

"What were you talking about, at that hour."

"Things a wife should probably ask her husband, not me." She tilted her head, almost gentle about it. "But you never do ask him much, do you. You just give him what he needs and wait for him to notice you. Six years, and you're still waiting."

I said nothing. There was nothing to say that she didn't already know the shape of.

She set a small cup on the table between us, steam still curling off it. "He asked me to bring you this before I left his rooms. Said you'd need it, after giving so much blood again."

"He asked you."

"Mm." Her smile finally moved, just slightly, the kind that already knew exactly what it was doing. "We talk more than you'd think."

I should have told her to leave. I should have thrown the cup at the wall and watched it shatter against her smug little face. Instead I picked it up, because some small idiot part of me still wanted to believe he'd thought of me at all tonight, and drank it down before she'd even finished smiling.

"Drink it all," she said. "Doctor's orders."

I finished it. She left a few minutes later, humming something under her breath, the door clicking shut behind her.

The pain hit before the sound of her footsteps faded down the hall.

It came low and wrong, a fist closing around everything beneath my ribs, and I doubled over the edge of the bed with a sound I didn't recognize as my own. I pressed a hand to my stomach and felt it again, sharper, twisting.

I looked down. The sheet under me was turning red, fast, faster than any cut should bleed.

"No." I pressed both hands against myself like that could hold anything in. "No. No."

Nobody came running. Nobody ever did.

The pain peaked and folded me clean in half. Through the haze I saw my own hands, red to the wrist, and understood what they were trying to tell me a full second before I let myself believe it.

"Help me!" The scream tore out of me before I could stop it. "Someone, please, help me!"

My baby.

Ivy POV

The sound that tore out of me didn't sound like mine. It still brought a maid running down the hall, her tray hitting the floor somewhere behind her.

Hands pressed cloth hard against me, urgent and sure. The room tipped and snapped back into focus, over and over. I bit down until I tasted copper. The pain didn't let up once.

I heard someone praying under their breath near the foot of the bed.

Then the healer's hands went quiet on me. That stillness said it before his face did.

"My lady. I'm sorry. We couldn't save him." His voice cracked on the last word, as the apology cost him something too.

I didn't ask him to say it again.

I lay in the wreck of the sheets and waited for the tears that came every other time. They didn't come. Something in me had gone past crying into something colder, something that watched the blood soak through the linen with nothing left to spend on it.

"Ivy." Julian's voice came from the doorway, not the bedside.

I turned my head and let myself hope for half a breath. The same stupid half-breath I always gave him.

He didn't come closer. His eyes touched the sheets and flinched away. "How could you let this happen?"

Not are you all right. Not even my name.

"I didn't let anything happen. Selena brought me a drink earlier tonight. She said it was from you."

His jaw went tight. "Don't put this on her."

"I'm telling you what happened, Julian."

"You're accusing my intended of poisoning my own wife." His voice dropped, colder than the room. "Watch what you say next."

The healer's hands had gone still on my shoulder. He didn't say a word in my defense. Nobody ever did, not to an Alpha, not even about the wife bleeding out in front of him.

A servant shoved through the door without knocking. "My lord! Lady Selena has collapsed. She won't stop screaming. She's asking for you!"

Selena's voice tore down the hall behind him, high and broken. "Julian! Please, I need you, I can't breathe-"

He was already moving.

He never once crossed the room to where I was.

Her sobbing followed him all the way down the hall. I'd already run out of excuses for any of them, right there, listening to it fade.

Six years of blood drawn from my own arm. A husband who ran to her instead of me. And now a child is gone, with no one in this house close enough to so much as hold my hand through it.

I closed my eyes and counted everything I'd just listed, the way I used to count coins as a girl. Except none of this could ever be paid back in kind.

Not tears. Debts.

My hand found my stomach on its own, pressing flat against nothing, the way it had every night for the past two months when there'd been something there to press toward. There was nothing there now. There never would be again, not from this body, not for him.

I made myself breathe through it instead of around it. Once. Twice. By the third breath, the ache had a shape I could use instead of one that used me.

If no one in this house meant to settle what they owed me, I'd collect it myself.

By the time the maids finished changing the linens, I already knew what I was going to do.

For three days, I played exactly the wife they expected. Quiet. Hollowed out. Grateful for every spoonful of broth they brought me. Let them watch a woman they thought was already broken.

At night, once the lamps along the corridor were doused, I sent for Raine.

She'd been my maid since the day I came to Silvercrest as a bride, the only person in this house who'd never once looked at me like I was something Julian was owed. She'd seen every year of it, said nothing to anyone, and never once asked me to be grateful for her silence. Her mother had kept the steward's records for years before age took her hands. Enough of it had stayed with Raine that she knew exactly what made a contract impossible to argue with.

She didn't ask if I was sure. She only asked, "When do you want it signed?"

"Before he has time to think about anything he reads."

Raine reached for a fresh sheet without being told twice. "Tell me what to write."

If anyone ever traced the paper back to her hand, she'd lose more than I would. She didn't hesitate once.

We worked by a single lamp until there was one sheet that said, in language no court could argue with, that I was done. I read it through twice. Something in my chest went still. It wasn't relief.

Raine folded it into the center of the household ledger without being told to. She buried it under purchase slips and supply totals, the one stack of paper in this house nobody ever looked at twice.

"He won't even glance at it," she said. "He never does."

She wasn't wrong. Now I only needed him distracted enough not to look twice.

Selena handed me that morning without meaning to. She'd kept him up half the night again, and by sunrise, he was already short with anyone who came near his desk. A clerk backed out of the room red-faced, clutching a torn page, and didn't look at me on his way past.

I carried the ledger in the way I always did, my voice as flat as the numbers inside it.

"The accounts. They need your signature."

He didn't lift his head. Pen down, ink, next page. Pen down, ink, next page. My whole future went under his hand, exactly where every line he'd never read had gone before it.

He signed it without once looking up at me.

I watched the ink sit there and kept my face still, even as something inside me exhaled for the first time in six years. Four years as a wife. Two more debts before that. He'd signed it away faster than he ever signed anything that mattered to him.

"That's all?" he said, already reaching for something else, his attention gone from me before the words finished leaving his mouth.

"That's all."

I walked out at the pace I'd walked in. Outside the study windows, rain had started, fine and steady against the glass.

Somewhere behind my ribs, the memory came anyway. A cloak around my shoulders once, in rain just like this. A man who'd asked for nothing back. I didn't let myself stay there long enough to feel it properly.

There would be time for that later. There was only one thing left to do before this house found out what I'd already taken from them.

The next day, the elders convened as they always did, rogue counts and supply ledgers droning past without a single word landing on me.

Meredith sat near the head of the table, exactly where she always positioned herself when something concerned her son.

Near the end, I stood.

Every voice in the room died at once. I never stood at these meetings.

"I, Ivy Lancaster, formally petition to dissolve my marriage contract with Julian Silvercrest." My hands stayed folded. My voice didn't shake, though something underneath it wanted to.

The room cracked open before I'd even finished his name. Chairs scraped back.

"Whoever heard of a wife standing up in open council to end her own marriage?" Meredith's voice cut through first, sharp enough to silence everyone else.

Julian shot to his feet. "Withdraw your petition! I won't allow this!"

"You did allow it." I let the silence stretch a moment before I said the rest. "Yesterday. In your study. Your own hand."

"Show me." His voice had lost the certainty it started with.

I drew the contract from my sleeve and set it on the table where every elder could see the ink. No one reached out to pick it up. No one needed to.

The blood left Julian's face. He stared down at his own name and said nothing.

Then he laughed, short and ugly, like I'd just proven something about myself instead of him.

"And go where?" His voice carried to every corner of the hall. "Your family's gone, Ivy. A dead father, a dead brother, a boy too young to shelter anyone. We're the only roof you've ever had since."

"Since you signed, we are no longer husband and wife." I kept my voice even. "Where I go next is no concern of yours."

"There's something else this table should know. I'm petitioning House Blackwood to bind a new contract. To Silas Blackwood, the Lycan King."

"Have you lost your mind?" Meredith's voice rang out before anyone else could speak. "Marrying a man who's been comatose for a year?"

Ivy POV

"A man who's been comatose for a year," I said, "can't humiliate me the way a husband who was wide awake managed to, for six."

Meredith's mouth thinned. Nobody at the table had an answer ready for that, least of all her.

An elder near the head of the table found his voice first. Both hands pressed flat against the wood, like he needed it to hold himself up. "Ivy. Listen to an old man for one moment. You fought free of one cage today. Why climb straight into another, with a door that may never open again?"

"She's right to worry for you," another said, gentler, shaking his head slow. "We watched you grow up in this house. None of us wants to see you throw yourself away on a gamble that never pays out."

A young elder I didn't recognize as well leaned forward, his voice careful, almost kind. "Even if he wakes one day, what will be left of you by then? You'll have spent your best years nursing a stranger."

A third leaned toward Meredith instead of me, voice dropping like he thought I couldn't hear it from there. "If House Blackwood declines, what's left for her? Nothing. Not even this roof."

"This roof was never mine to lose." I looked at him until he stopped pretending he hadn't said it to my face. "I'll find another one. I always have. I did it once already, the night my father's name stopped meaning anything to anyone in this hall, and I'll do it again if I have to."

He had nothing to put against that. None of them did.

I let all of it land and stay there. None of them had earned a fight out of me.

"Whatever the answer turns out to be," I said, "you'll all see it soon enough."

I turned before anyone found another argument to throw. The doors shut behind me. The echo lasted longer than it should have.

Alone in the corridor, I let my shoulders drop the half inch I hadn't allowed them inside.

Six years of folding myself small enough to fit whatever room Julian stood in. One council meeting, and I'd already stopped doing it without even noticing the change happening in myself.

My hand found the bare skin at my collar before I'd gone ten steps. Three days the pendant had been gone, carried past the palace gates in Raine's closed fist along with everything else I'd staked on one answer.

It used to sit there even in the rain, two years ago, hidden under a coat that smelled nothing like Julian.

By the time the hunting party scattered, I was the last one left on the mountain road, engines already fading into the trees ahead of me. A few other cars passed close enough that their headlights swept right over me, and not one slowed. Nobody wanted to be the one Julian heard about later, helping the wife he'd already forgotten in the dark. I kept walking because there was nothing else to do with my legs. Sylvie didn't surge to carry me. She hadn't surged in years.

A car finally did slow, idling at the edge of the road like it had been circling back for me on purpose.

"You're a long way from Silvercrest territory."

I didn't place the voice until the window came down and I saw the crest stamped into the door. Silas Blackwood, watching me through the gap in the glass.

"I'm fine," I said, because that was the only thing I knew how to say to anyone by then.

"You're not." He was already out of the car, already shrugging out of his own coat. He didn't ask before he settled it around my shoulders, the wool still warm from his own body. "Get in. I'll take you the rest of the way."

I didn't move yet. "Why would you bother?"

"Because nobody else did." He said it plainly, like the answer embarrassed him more than it should have.

I cried somewhere around the second turn and couldn't make myself stop, my breath catching in ugly little hiccups I couldn't smooth out. He didn't ask why, didn't fill the silence with anything that needed answering, just drove with one hand loose on the wheel.

I trusted my voice again before I spoke. "He'll come looking for you eventually. When he remembers I exist."

"Let him look." Silas didn't take his eyes off the road. "You're not his to find tonight."

When the gates came into view he pulled over short of them, like he understood I didn't want to be seen arriving this way. He pressed something small and cold into my palm and folded my fingers shut around it before I could look down.

"What is it?" My fingers were too numb to feel the shape properly.

"Something to remember me by, if it ever comes to that." He said it like it cost him nothing, though I learned later that nothing about that pendant had come cheap. "Keep it. If you ever need anything, ask. I mean it."

Nobody had ever meant anything that plainly with me before.

A young attendant's voice cut through the memory, close and apologetic. "My lady, Madam Meredith is waiting."

"For what?"

"Settling the household accounts, my lady. She said it's time everything currently in your name was accounted for."

I knew exactly what that meant. If Blackwood turned me down, she meant to make sure I walked out of this house with nothing she hadn't already counted twice.

The boy led the way three steps ahead, eyes on the floor the way new staff always kept them. Mine were half on the floor too, still caught somewhere on that rainy road.

He stopped so abruptly I nearly walked into his back. He dropped into a bow before I'd even registered why.

"Alpha Julian."

I looked up, startled out of the mountain road and back into the present. Julian stood at the mouth of the corridor, arms crossed.

"Convenient." He didn't wait for me to come any closer. "You knew I'd be through here. Staging your little victory lap right in front of me."

"I didn't know anything. Your mother summoned me."

"You expect me to believe that?" His mouth curved, ugly at the corners. "You didn't get what you wanted in that council room, so now you're out here proving a point to anyone who'll watch. This is spite, Ivy. Nothing more. You'll regret it, and sooner than you think."

"Funny." I held his stare. "I wasn't the one who took the long way around just to end up standing exactly where I'd have to pass."

"I don't go out of my way for you."

"Then it's a remarkable coincidence. Twice in one day."

"Careful." His voice dropped, quieter than before, which had always meant something worse was coming. "You're enjoying this a little too much for someone who just humiliated herself in front of the entire council."

"Is that what it looked like to you?" I tilted my head. "From where I stood, you were the one who couldn't find his own voice once I put that contract on the table. Every elder in that room saw it happen."

"You think this makes you clever." His voice climbed. "It makes you desperate. A woman throwing herself at a corpse because the living wouldn't have her."

His jaw locked. For one full second nothing in his face moved at all.

Then the pressure came down, that old familiar weight of an Alpha trying to flatten everyone smaller than him into the floor. It used to buckle my knees before I even understood what was happening to them.

I stood there and let it land on me. Nothing in me buckled. Sylvie didn't even stir.

Something caught in his own throat instead. His breath snagged hard, his hand coming up to his collar, and he had to look away and force a cough out before he could speak again.

I almost laughed. I didn't bother hiding that I wanted to.

"Something funny?" His voice came out rough, scraped thin, like the cough had taken something out of him on its way up.

"You. Choking on your own temper because I didn't flinch."

His face went a shade darker. He took a step closer, hand lifting halfway, like he hadn't decided yet what he meant to do with it. I didn't step back to find out.

Footsteps cut in before he had the chance to decide, fast and uneven on the stone, like whoever it was had run most of the way.

Raine rounded the corner first, a messenger from the inner court half a step behind her, his collar still crooked from how fast he'd come, his chest still working to catch up with his own legs. Raine's eyes went straight past Julian and found mine.

"My lady. There's an answer. From House Blackwood."