Rejected By My Alpha, Alone with his Hair

Chapter 5

Ivy POV

My hands were shaking so hard I tore the envelope instead of opening it properly.

Mirek looked up from the herb bench across the clinic, brow furrowed. "Ivy? You've gone white as a sheet."

I couldn't answer him. I unfolded the single sheet of paper inside and recognized the handwriting immediately quick, slanted, familiar in a way that hit me like cold water.

Halsey.

Ivy I found you. Don't panic, I didn't tell anyone how, and I'm not going to. I've kept my mouth shut for three years and I'll keep it shut as long as you need. But something's happening here you need to know about, and I couldn't sit on it.

Delia Grayfen called off the engagement two months ago. Nobody knows exactly why the story changes depending on who you ask but the Grayfen alliance is falling apart, and Kessler's pack is testing the border again. Thorne is scrambling. Ronan's been different since it happened. Quiet. Nobody's seen him smile in months, not that he did much of that before.

I'm not telling you this to make you feel sorry for him. I'm telling you because a Grayfen trader came through here last week asking questions about a woman matching your description who left Ashen Hollow three years ago with a sick mother. I don't know what that means yet. I don't like it.

Be careful, Ivy. Whatever's coming, I think it's coming toward you.

I read the letter three times before the words fully landed.

The Grayfen engagement was off. And someone a Grayfen trader, not even one of Ronan's own people was asking about me. Not idle gossip. Questions. Specific ones.

"Ivy." Mirek's voice cut through the ringing in my ears. He'd crossed the room without me noticing, one hand hovering like he wasn't sure whether to touch my shoulder. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing." The lie came automatically, the same reflex I'd built over three years of never explaining where I came from or why. "Just news from home. Bad timing, that's all."

He didn't push, though I could see he didn't quite believe me. Mirek had learned, over three years, exactly which of my walls not to knock on.

I left the clinic early that day and walked straight to the small schoolhouse where Wren spent his mornings, arriving well before pickup time, standing at the fence with my heart hammering while I watched him through the window dark head bent over a slate, tongue poking out the corner of his mouth in concentration, those unmistakable pale blue eyes catching the afternoon light.

He looked so much like his father it physically hurt some days. Today it terrified me.

If someone from Ashen Hollow from Ronan's world found their way to Cedar Ridge and saw that face, there would be no explaining it away. No story I could tell that would hold up against eyes that exact shade of ice-blue.

I thought about running again that night, lying awake with Wren's small warm body curled against my side, running through every option like a woman counting exits in a burning building. I could take him further, somewhere even more remote, start over a third time. I could write back to Halsey, beg for more information, try to understand exactly what threat was coming before I decided how to meet it.

Or I could stop running.

The thought sat strange in my chest, unfamiliar, like trying on a coat that didn't quite fit yet. I turned it over the way I used to turn over Ronan's rejection in that council hall, examining it from every angle, waiting for it to feel like a mistake. It didn't. If anything, the longer I sat with it, the more it felt like the first honest decision I'd made about Ashen Hollow in three years.

I wasn't the girl who'd left Ashen Hollow in the back of a farmer's cart anymore. I ran half a clinic. I'd built a home with my own two hands out of nothing but stubbornness and fear. I'd raised a son alone through two brutal winters and never once let him go hungry, never once let him doubt he was wanted.

If Ronan Blackwood was somehow coming for answers whether because of gossip, or a trader's idle questions, or something worse he was going to find a very different woman than the one he'd rejected by that fire three years ago.

My mother found me still sitting at the kitchen table well after dark, the letter folded neatly in front of me, untouched food gone cold on the plate beside it.

"You've been staring at that same spot on the wall for an hour," she said gently, easing herself into the chair across from me. Her health had improved so much these past two years I sometimes forgot how frail she'd once looked, back when I'd first suggested this whole reckless move. "Tell me."

So I told her everything the letter said, watching her face carefully for the fear I felt sitting in my own chest.

She didn't look afraid. She looked, if anything, almost calm.

"Then let them come," she said simply. "You've spent three years building something real, Ivy. Nobody not Ronan Blackwood, not a Grayfen trader, not the whole Ashen Hollow council gets to walk in here and make you small again. Not unless you let them."

I held onto those words that night, turning them over like a stone I could carry in my pocket, and I finally let myself close my eyes beside my sleeping son.

I didn't know yet how right I was to be afraid. I didn't know that four days later, a stranger would walk into Mirek's clinic asking for the healer everyone called "Ivy," and that the moment he looked up and saw my face, his whole expression would change because he wasn't a stranger at all.

He was one of Ronan Blackwood's own guards. The boy from the pack house door. The one who used to trade me lunch when we were nine years old.

And he already knew exactly who Wren was.