Bound to My Enemy's Alpha

The forest behind Ivy Ashwood's cabin had rules, and she had broken every one of them tonight. Rule one, never run during a full moon. Rule two, never run without silver in her pocket, not to use, just to remember what it felt like to be human enough to need it. Rule three, the only one that had ever mattered, the one her mother had pressed into her the night everything burned... Never let them know what you are. Ivy was breaking that one right now, barefoot, heart racing, her senses becoming sharper. She hadn't meant to shift. At least not today, on a full moon of all days. But today her wolf didn’t want to listen. Having been locked up for years, it wanted to be free tonight. After resisting her wolf for about thirty minutes, while also locking herself in, her hands trembled as she reached for her tiny house deadbolt. One second, she was in control and the next her deep brown fur began to unfurl. She hadn't shifted since she was twelve years old. Since the night the Ashwood pack lands had turned into a bonfire of screaming and blood-slick earth, since she'd watched from inside a hollow tree while men in dark cloaks made sure no one who carried her family's name lived to tell it. She'd survived by forgetting how to be a wolf. And now Ivy Ashwood... blue-eyed, fever-hot, more animal than she'd let herself be since childhood... was running through Duskmoor territory like the forest itself had been waiting for her to slip. Her senses now sharper than it had been for the past nine years. She could see clearly as though it was high noon, she could even smell the deer carcass that had decayed for over a week now though its miles away from where she was. As the wind moved between her fur, a little joy began to bubble up within her chest but that was only for a second as she remembered whose land this was. Everyone on the eastern ridge knew whose land this was. Duskmoor wasn't just a Barony; it was the Barony that answered most directly to the Crown, its Alpha close enough to the throne that trespassing here wasn't a territorial insult, it was practically treason. You didn't cross into Duskmoor land by accident, not unless you had a death wish or spectacularly bad luck, and as for Ivy well, she’s not one versed in good luck. She had no sigil to protect her. No house to answer for her if she was caught. Being claimed by exactly no one, had been the entire point. The reason she'd stayed breathing this long. A wolf with no sigil or allegiance, she was supposed to be a rumour, not a body running through someone else's moonlight. A howl brought her back to reality. This wasn’t a good sign. She’s finally been discovered, her scent gave her away she was sure. The howl was close, too close. This wasn’t a warning howl. But hunting. Ivy's wolf... young, furious, thrilled despite everything... wanted to answer it. But she knew she was no match for her trackers as the number of wolves that answered the call were at least five and she was sure Betas would be among her hunters. While she... she was only an Omega. To them, she would be nothing more than a punching bag. She needed to escape them as soon as possible. Branches tore at her. Light scratches appeared on her. Her pace increased as she tried to lose them between the trees. But she could hear them now. Not one wolf but a whole hunting party, all moving with the terrible coordination of a trained pack, cutting through the trees to flank her. They're herding me. The thought landed like ice water. This wasn't a territorial skirmish. This was more like a hunt. With the pack being the predators and her, their unwilling prey. She broke from the tree line into a moonlit clearing at a dead sprint and skidded to a stop only because there was nowhere left to go.... a rock face rose on one side, sheer and unclimbable, and from the shadows, Yellow-eyed shapes emerged one by one until she was ringed by six wolves. And the biggest of the hunting party was a black furred Crimson eyed wolf. Each step it took closer to her, she could feel the air within her lungs escape and not return. Ivy backed toward the rock, wolf-shape rattling with a fear she refused to let win, and bared her own teeth back... a pathetic, human-shaped defiance in an entirely wrong-sized body. Run, screamed the part of her that had learned to survive by disappearing. Fight, growled at the part of her she'd spent nine years trying to bury. Neither got the chance. The biggest got closer to her, he didn't growl. He didn't need to. The forest itself seemed to hold its breath around him, and Ivy's wolf, as it looked into those deep crimson eyes went utterly, humiliatingly still. Alpha. The word arrived in her mind unbidden, ancient, instinctive.... not a guess but a recognition, the kind bred into her bones long before she'd been born. Every hair on her body rose. Every nerve screamed the same warning her mother had died trying to teach her. Run. Now. Before he looks at you. He looked at her. And the world did something Ivy had no name for. It wasn't painful, exactly. It was closer to the moment a bone that's been set wrong is finally, violently set right.... a full-body wrongness correcting itself so fast it felt like breaking. Her human heart, buried under fur and fear, slammed once, hard, against her ribs like it was trying to escape her chest and go to him instead. The black wolf went rigid too. She saw it... the way his massive shoulders locked, as though the world had stopped. His crimson eyes now assessed her. Deep within her she felt something, a new feeling, a bond tying her to him. he’s... he's her mate. No, no, absolutely not, I do not have time for this. A mate bond didn't ask permission. It never had. The black wolf shifted first.... a ripple of muscle and moonlight, and then a man was crouched in the clearing where a wolf had been, tall and dark-haired and unfairly, infuriatingly beautiful in the way that expensive, dangerous things always were. Bare-chested, unbothered by a cold that had Ivy's human mind shivering in sympathy even in wolf-shape, he rose to his full height with the unhurried menace of someone who had never once needed to prove he was in charge of a room. Or a forest. Or, apparently, her pulse. "Shift," he said. His voice sounded soft and caring. Ivy didn't move. Every instinct she had, the ones that had kept her alive for nine years, screamed to stay four-legged, stay fast, stay ready to run the second his guard dropped. His eyes swept over her with an intensity that made her want to crawl out of her own skin, and something in his expression shifted from command to something far more dangerous. Interest. "You're trespassing on Duskmoor land," he said, "in the middle of a hunt, during a full moon, unmarked." His gaze flicked, once, to the bare stretch of shoulder where a sigil should have burned into her skin and hadn't. Wolves without a mark weren't supposed to be strong enough to outrun a hunting party. They weren't supposed to make an Alpha's chest ache like something had been dropped into it from a great height. "No house. No claim.” His jaw tightened, like the admission cost him something he wasn't used to paying. "Tell me who you are." I don't know anymore, she thought, and hated how true it felt. Ivy's wolf wanted, with an urgency that terrified her, to obey him. She could feel her bones as they began to want to shift but her human mind remembered the fire and screaming. The emptiness of being alone and wanting to trust her own kind, won by a margin so narrow it felt like luck rather than strength. She turned, and ran for the rock face instead, claws finding that no wolf twice her size could follow her onto. She scaled the wall and ran. Behind her, she heard him move... not chase, not yet, just a single step forward, like he was testing whether the bond would let him watch her go. It didn't have to. She felt it anyway... that thread, thin and unbreakable and already too tight, pulling taut between them as the distance grew, a promise neither of them had agreed to and neither of them could cut. "Who doesn’t love a good chase?" he said, low, into a clearing that was already emptying of everything but moonlight. He didn't have her name. He didn't have her house, her history, or a single true thing about her.