Lured by the Alpha

Ivy POV For eighteen years, I believed I was ordinary. My mother Margaret Curtis used to smile when she said that. She would brush my hair every morning before school, hum old songs while making breakfast, and tell me that ordinary was a blessing. That it meant safety. That it meant peace. I believed her because she was all I had ever known. My mum told me I was hers. Not adopted. Not borrowed. Hers. And when I asked about my father, she would simply say he was gone and that love, not blood, was what mattered. I never questioned it. Why would I? She loved me fiercely and , protected me fiercely, and to me that was enough. She also told me something else. Something that lingered like a shadow at the back of my mind. “There’s a couple,” she would say carefully, always choosing her words. “A very wealthy couple. They sponsor your education, your clothes, your needs. They care about you very much, Ivy. They just… can’t be present.” I never met them. Never spoke to them. Never even knew their names. But the money always came. Tuition paid. Books covered. quiet expenses my mother pretended not to notice. Even things I did not ask for would show up at our door, new shoes when mine wore thin, a laptop the week my old one died, envelopes with no return address and checks that made my mom’s hands shake when she cashed them. Somewhere out there, familiar yet unseen and silent. I knew someone was watching over me. I did not know if that thought was comforting or terrifying. The first vision came on my nineteenth birthday. I was standing at the kitchen sink, drying dishes, when the world… slipped. That’s the only way I can describe it. The room blurred, colors dimmed, and suddenly I wasn’t there anymore. I saw my neighbor, Mr. Calloway, perched on the old oak tree in his backyard, the one everyone warned him about. I saw the branch crack. I saw his body fall. I heard the sound of bone against earth. I dropped the plate. It shattered, the noise sharp and violent, snapping me back into my body. My heart raced, breath shallow, palms slick with sweat. My mom found me sitting on my bed, knees pulled to my chest, shaking. “It’s just stress,” she said softly, though her hands trembled when she held my face. “You’re tired. That’s all.” I didn’t answer Two hours later, the ambulance screamed down our street. Red and white lights flashed through the windows. I stood frozen at the edge of my bedroom, fingers digging into the doorframe as paramedics rushed past our house. My mom was behind me in seconds. Her hands landed on my shoulders. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. That was the first time I understood something was wrong with me. But it didn’t stop. The visions came without warning. Flashes, fragments, moments stitched into my mind before they happened. I was brushing my teeth when I saw my classmate Lydia in a white dress, then red wine spilled across her chest like a wound. I saw the embarrassment on her face as the image slammed into me. “Ivy?” Lydia laughed when I told her later that day, twirling in front of her mirror. “It’s not even a wine party.” “Just maybe don’t wear that one,” I said. “Trust me.” She frowned. “You’re being weird.” At the party, the spill happened exactly how I’d seen it. From the shocked silence, down to the way Lydia’s face crumpled as laughter followed. She didn’t look at me the same after that. I saw a teacher trip over nothing and break his wrist. I saw strange things too. Shadows where there shouldn’t be any, eyes watching from empty hallways, a silver glow in mirrors that vanished when I blinked. I tried to warn people at first. Soon, they stopped listening. Then they started whispering. Weird. Creepy. They looked at me like I was something unsettling. Something wrong. At school, people stopped sitting with me. At lunch, trays clattered and conversations buzzed around me, but the seat across from mine stayed empty. I watched a girl I used to laugh with glance at me, then look away, her smile stiff and forced. Friends stopped calling. Invitations dried up. Conversations ended when I walked into a room. Even teachers watched me differently, as if expecting me to say something disturbing. Loneliness settled in quietly, like dust. My mom tried to help. She filled the house with noise, encouraged me to go out, told me again and again that none of this defined me. But I saw the fear in her eyes when she thought I wasn’t looking. The way she locked doors more carefully. The way she watched me sleep. “I don’t want you to disappear into yourself,” she said one night, voice breaking. “I don’t want this world to break you.” That was when she told me about The Arcanum University. The most prestigious institution in the country. Elite. Selective. Reserved for the gifted, the powerful, the exceptional, the wealthy. “You need a fresh start,” she said. “Somewhere new. Somewhere bigger than this town.” I didn’t know then that Arcanum wasn’t just bigger. It was dangerous. But I said yes. Because staying meant suffocating under the weight of other people’s fear. Staying meant becoming the strange girl everyone avoided. Staying meant pretending I wasn’t seeing the future unravel itself in front of me. So I packed my bags. I left the only home I had ever known. I hugged the woman I believed was my mother, unaware that somewhere far away, evil was watching, waiting to take full force. I was Ivy Curtis. The girl people whispered about. The girl no one understood. So I left And without knowing it, I was walking straight toward the truth about who I was, where I came from, and the destiny that had been waiting for me all along.