Rejected By My Alpha, Alone with his Hair

Chapter 3

Ivy POV

My mother looked at me the next morning like I'd suggested we fly to the moon instead of walk to Cedar Ridge.

"You're serious," she said, wrapped in the blanket that never seemed to keep her warm enough anymore.

"I'm serious." I knelt in front of her chair again, the same spot I'd knelt in the night before. "Cedar Ridge has a proper healer. A real clinic, not the half-stocked shelf Old Bettins runs out of her kitchen. You'd get real treatment there, Mama."

"We don't have the money for real treatment anywhere, sweetheart."

"I'll find work. I'm good with herbs, good with wounds every pack needs a healer's assistant. We'll manage." I squeezed her hands. "Please. Trust me on this one."

She studied me a long moment, and something in her face softened, like she saw more than I wanted her to see. "All right," she said finally. "All right, Ivy. We'll go."

Telling Halsey was harder than I expected.

"You're just going to leave." She stood in my kitchen with her arms crossed, eyes bright with something between hurt and anger. "No goodbye to anyone else. No plan. You're just going to disappear."

"That's exactly the plan."

"Ivy." Her voice cracked. "What about the baby?"

I flinched, even though it was only the two of us in the room. "What about it?"

"You're going to raise his child two hundred miles away and never tell him? He's the Alpha, Ivy, he has a right to"

"He had a right to hear me out four separate times, Halsey, and he chose Delia Grayfen's wedding logistics instead." The words came out harder than I meant them to, but I didn't take them back. "He made his choice before he even knew there was a choice to make. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life waiting to see if he changes his mind."

Halsey went quiet. Then she crossed the kitchen and pulled me into a hug so tight it nearly hurt.

"I hate this," she said into my hair. "I hate that this is happening to you. I hate that he's too much of a coward to even hear you out."

"I hate it too." My voice broke for the first time since the council hall. "But I'm not going to be the girl who begs, Halsey. I've already been that girl once. I'm done."

"Promise me you'll write. Once you're settled. Just to let me know you're both alive." She pulled back and held my face in both hands. "You don't have to tell me where. Just that you're safe."

"I promise."

We left Ashen Hollow eleven days later, before dawn, before anyone in that pack could see us go.

My mother slept most of the journey, wrapped in every blanket we owned, her breathing shallow but steady. I sat beside her in the back of a farmer's cart we'd paid for with nearly every coin I had left, watching the mountains that had been my whole world shrink behind us, and I let myself feel it all of it, the humiliation, the grief, the fear of what came next because I knew once we crossed into Cedar Ridge territory, I wouldn't have the luxury of falling apart anymore.

I pressed my hand flat against my stomach, still barely showing, and made a promise to the child inside me.

You are never going to grow up wondering if you're wanted. Not for one single day.

The driver, an older man named Ferris who'd made the Cedar Ridge run for thirty years and asked no questions worth answering, glanced back at us once around midday.

"Running from something?" he asked, not unkindly.

"Running toward something," I said, and I made myself believe it as I said it.

He nodded slowly, like that was an answer he'd heard plenty of times before, and didn't ask again.

Cedar Ridge came into view on the second afternoon smaller than Ashen Hollow, greener, tucked into a valley instead of clinging to a mountainside. A place where nobody knew the name Blackwood, and nobody knew the name Marlowe either.

A place where I could become someone new.

I didn't know yet how hard the next three years would be. I didn't know about the nights I'd rock a crying newborn alone in a rented room with no heat, or the days I'd skip meals so my mother could eat, or the slow, grinding work of building something out of nothing with my own two hands.

I only knew one thing as that cart rolled down into the valley, the late sun turning the pines gold on either side of the road: whatever came next, it was mine. Nobody else's. Mine to build, mine to survive, mine to be proud of.

My mother stirred beside me and opened her eyes just as the first rooftops of Cedar Ridge came into view below us.

"It's pretty," she murmured, half asleep still.

"It's going to be home," I told her, and for the first time since that fire three weeks ago, I said something I actually believed without having to force it.

We found a room above a bakery that first night, small and cold and smelling faintly of yesterday's bread, and it was still the best sleep I'd had in weeks. No one here knew my name. No one here had watched me stand by that fire and get handed my own humiliation in front of a whole pack. For the first time since the moon ceremony, I fell asleep without replaying Ronan's voice in my head.

The next morning I walked the length of Cedar Ridge's main road twice before I worked up the nerve to knock on the clinic door. A broad-shouldered woman named Ora answered, flour still on her apron from some errand she'd clearly been running before I interrupted her.

"We're not hiring," she said, before I'd even opened my mouth.

"I don't need much. Just a chance to prove I'm worth keeping around." I held up my hands, the same.