Bound to My Enemy's Alpha

The Unannounced Guest

IVY’S POV

Councillor Miriam Voss stood in the doorway, a smile on her face.

“May I come in?”

Ivy was still dazed when she heard those words.

“Oh, sorry, you may come in,” Ivy said, leaving the doorway to let her pass.

Ivy stared at the councillor, wondering why she was here. Miriam came in, her gaze drifting over every corner of the room, before she found a place to sit.

She walked over to the chair. “May I?”

The councillor sat, her eyes settling back on Ivy.

“Pretty sure you must be wondering why I’m here.”

“Yes, councillor.”

“Oh, please. Drop the formalities. Call me Miriam.”

Ivy blinked, caught off guard. Everything about tonight kept getting stranger by the second.

“Okay,” Ivy said, finding a place to sit herself.

“So, back to the reason I’m here.” Miriam folded her hands neatly in her lap. “I’m here about your journey to House Voss, and your training.”

“Training?”

“Yes. You’ll need to be trained, just like every other werewolf who’s to stand in court. And you are, after all, the future Queen of this court.”

“So?”

“So you’ll be sent to the kingdom’s war college, alongside other royalty and nobles. There you’ll learn what it truly means to be a werewolf and how to harness the abilities that come with being sworn to House Voss.”

“Oh.”

Miriam rose and crossed toward the door, unhurried, every movement precise. “I look forward to hearing great reports about you.” She paused at the threshold, glancing back with that same practiced warmth. “Someone will come for you soon, to take you to the Voss estate, within its territory.”

And then she was gone, the door clicking softly shut behind her, leaving Ivy alone with a silence that felt far louder than it should have.

The knock that came for her an hour later belonged to a guard, not a councillor, a quiet, yellow-eyed woman who introduced herself only as Fenna and said little else on the ride out of Duskmoor beyond directions Ivy hadn’t asked for. Ivy found she preferred it that way. She’d had enough conversation for one night, and Miriam’s easy, borrowed warmth still sat strangely in her chest, like a coat that fit but wasn’t hers.

Voss Hall rose out of the dark a little before dawn older and lower than Duskmoor’s stronghold, stone gone soft grey with centuries of weather, a wolf’s-head sigil howling beneath a carved crescent moon above the gate. Ivy didn’t have the energy left to be impressed by it. She barely had the energy to make it up the front steps before someone took her arm and steered her toward a room, a bed, and a silence deep enough to finally let her sleep.

The weeks that followed blurred together in a way Ivy hadn’t expected.

Voss Hall ran on a rhythm entirely its own, quieter than court, colder in ways that had nothing to do with the stone walls, every hallway populated by sworn wolves who watched her with careful, unreadable eyes and said little beyond what courtesy required. She was given lessons, though lessons felt like too gentle a word for what they actually were: hours spent learning the particular etiquette owed to a Councillor’s household, the histories of houses she’d never heard of before the Rite, the careful, layered language of court that said one thing aloud and meant several others beneath it.

Miriam appeared at odd intervals, always warm, always attentive, always asking questions that felt, in the moment, like simple curiosity, and only afterward, replayed in the quiet of Ivy’s own room, took on the shape of something more deliberate. Do you remember much of your childhood? Do you dream of anywhere in particular? Has anyone ever told you that you look like someone they used to know?

Ivy answered as little as she could get away with, every time, and told herself the tightening in her chest whenever Miriam smiled at her was simple exhaustion. She mostly believed it.

The bond with Kael thinned with distance, but never fully quieted, a low, constant hum at the edge of her awareness, warm some nights, strained and distant on others, though he never once reached for her through it the way he had in Duskmoor’s corridors. She wondered, more than once, if that was his choice or simply the cost of the miles between them. She didn’t ask. She wasn’t certain, some nights, that she wanted to know the answer.

By the time a courier arrived at Voss Hall bearing a sealed letter with the royal crescent pressed into black wax, Ivy had almost, almost, learned to stop counting the days.

“The war college,” Miriam said, reading over the letter with an expression Ivy couldn’t fully place, something between satisfaction and calculation, gone too quickly to study properly. “Sooner than I expected them to call for you. The Crown must be eager to see what you’re made of.”

“When do I leave?”

“Tomorrow, at first light.” Miriam folded the letter with careful, unhurried hands.

“You’ll travel alone from the base of the mountain. It’s tradition, the Old Keep doesn’t open its gates for anyone who hasn’t proven they can reach them on their own two feet.”

Something flickered behind her pale eyes, there and gone before Ivy could name it.

“A fitting first trial, I’ve always thought. Some things simply can’t be climbed for you.”

Ivy said nothing to that. She’d learned, in her weeks at Voss Hall, that silence was often the safest response Miriam left her.

The mountain came into view a little after dawn the following morning, vast, grey, its peak lost somewhere above a bank of low cloud that never seemed to lift no matter how long Ivy watched it. The carriage that had carried her this far turned back the moment she stepped down onto the frost-hardened road, wheels crunching away into the distance until even the sound of them had gone, leaving her utterly, completely alone at the base of a climb that stretched up and up into nothing she could see the end of.

No guards. No escort. No Kael, no bond-warmth reaching for her across the distance to steady her nerves, only the mountain, and the narrow, half-hidden path winding up into it, and the pendant resting cold and quiet against her skin beneath her collar.

Ivy stood there for a long moment, breath fogging in the thin morning air, and thought of everything the last several weeks had asked of her, the Rite, the fire in her skin, Miriam’s careful, patient questions, the ache of a bond stretched thin across too many miles.

One more thing, she told herself, tightening the strap of her pack over one shoulder. Just one more thing to survive.

Ivy stared up the mountain as the cold began to seep into her bones.

“Just one more“