Rejected By My Alpha, Alone with his Hair

Chapter 4

Ivy POV

The scream that tore out of me didn't sound like my own voice.

Cedar Ridge's healer, the same broad, no-nonsense woman who'd hired me on trust nine months earlier, gripped my hand hard enough to bruise. "One more, Ivy. One more push, you're almost there."

I don't remember deciding to push. I remember the pain, white and total, and my mother's voice somewhere close, murmuring something in the old pack tongue she used to sing when I was small and scared of thunder. I remember Ora's steady hands. And then, all at once, a different sound cut through the room high, furious, alive.

"A boy," Ora said, and I heard the smile in her voice even through my own exhaustion. "A big, healthy boy, Ivy."

They put him on my chest before I'd even caught my breath, and every ounce of pain in my body went quiet at once.

He had dark hair, damp and matted against his tiny head. His eyes, when they finally blinked open and found something close to focus, were the palest, sharpest blue I had ever seen.

Ronan's eyes. Exactly, unmistakably, Ronan's eyes.

I sat there in that small rented room with my son on my chest, my mother crying softly in the corner, and I felt something c***k open in my chest that had nothing to do with grief.

"What are you going to name him?" my mother asked, wiping her eyes.

I looked down at that small furious face, already so certain of itself, already refusing to be quiet.

"Wren," I said. "His name is Wren."

Not a name that meant anything in Ashen Hollow. Not a name tied to any bloodline, any council, any Alpha's lineage. Just a name I liked, small and strong, a bird that survives hard winters.

The first year nearly broke me.

I found work at Cedar Ridge's clinic within a month, cleaning instruments and running errands for a healer named Mirek who took one look at my hands and said I had a gift for herb work, the kind you can't teach. It didn't pay much. Some weeks it didn't pay enough, and I'd skip dinner and tell my mother I'd already eaten so she wouldn't argue about her own portion.

Wren cried through most nights that first winter. I'd walk him in slow circles around our single rented room, humming the same old-tongue songs my mother used to sing me, watching frost creep up the inside of the window glass, and some nights I let myself cry too, quietly, so he wouldn't hear it and learn that crying was something to be scared of.

I never once let myself write to Ashen Hollow. Not to Ronan. Not even to Halsey, at first, though that one nearly killed me I missed her so badly some days it felt physical, a hollow ache right under my ribs that no amount of work could fill.

But I knew, with a certainty that sat in my bones like iron, that the moment word got back to Ronan Blackwood that Ivy Marlowe had a son with his eyes, everything I was building here would come apart.

So I built quietly. I built carefully. I built a life with my own two hands, brick by brick, and I refused to look back at the mountain I'd left behind.

By Wren's second birthday, Mirek had started teaching me real healing work not just fetching bandages, but reading wounds, mixing tinctures, understanding which fevers meant nothing and which meant everything. My mother's health steadied, slowly, under Cedar Ridge's proper care, color coming back into her face for the first time in years. Some mornings I'd catch her humming while she worked in the little garden behind our cottage, and I'd have to look away so she wouldn't see me crying at something that simple, that ordinary, that impossible three years earlier.

I remember one afternoon in particular, near the end of that second year, when Mirek handed me a feverish child no older than five and simply stepped back. "Your call," he said. "I'll be right here, but it's your call."

My hands shook the whole time I worked, checking the boy's pulse, pressing cool cloths to his forehead, measuring out a tincture I'd mixed myself for the first time without anyone standing over my shoulder. When the fever finally broke an hour later and the boy's mother wept with relief, Mirek just nodded once, like it was nothing, like he'd never doubted me for a second.

I cried the whole walk home that night. Not from exhaustion. From something closer to pride, a feeling I'd nearly forgotten the shape of.

By his third birthday, I wasn't the frightened girl who'd arrived in a farmer's cart anymore. I ran half of Mirek's clinic myself. I had a small, sturdy cottage instead of a rented room. I had a son who ran wild through the valley with a laugh that carried for miles, who didn't know a single thing about mate bonds or councils or a mountain pack two hundred miles away.

I had built something. Something that was mine.

I told myself it was enough. I told myself I didn't think about Ronan Blackwood anymore, not really, not the way I used to.

I was lying to myself, but I was good enough at it by then to almost believe it. There were still nights, rare ones, when I'd catch Wren tilting his head a certain way, or setting his jaw stubborn and tight over something small, and my chest would ache with a recognition I hadn't asked for.

Which is exactly why the letter that arrived on an ordinary Tuesday morning carried by a Cedar Ridge courier who said only that it had come from a trader passing through, urgent, addressed to "the Marlowe woman" knocked the breath clean out of my chest before I'd even broken the seal.

My hands were still trembling when I finally set the letter down on the kitchen table, unopened, and looked over at Wren, who was busy stacking wooden blocks in the corner, humming some tuneless little song to himself, completely unaware that the quiet life I'd built around him had just cracked at the edges.

Somebody in Ashen Hollow knew where I was.