Bound to My Enemy's Alpha

The Chase

IVY’S POV

Ivy had learned, a long time ago, that grief had a smell.

It had a thick odour, and it carried with it faint scents of depression. And that’s how Ivy felt every time she was in this little cottage. The furniture, the carvings, and pictures all brought back memories of the ones she had lost.

Memories of how she and her mother used to sit near the fireplace and do her hair, while her father and her elder brothers sat at the table drinking and making jokes. Or the times they would all sit down to sing together, before ending up in a howl. All these memories caused her heart to ache.

But all that is gone now and she has to leave this place, if she wants to live. She took her clothes as she began to shove them into a bag.

Where was she going? She had no idea. Only one thing rang through her head.

Stupid.

Only if I had stayed put.

She'd known the risk of living this close to Duskmoor's border. But what choice did she have anyway? Her family, the Ashwoods, were all killed within a night by other werewolves and she didn’t know who was responsible.

And where better to hide than in the territory of the strongest werewolves. A place where other werewolves dreaded going to.

A place hardly patrolled as it’s the home of the fiercest werewolf alive. Also, because a foolish part of her had wanted to live close enough to a real pack to remember, occasionally, what it had sounded like to belong to one.

She hadn't planned on a werewolf ever looking at her the way he had looked at her. And even if a werewolf did at least not an alpha.

Her head pressed back against the furniture as she tried to get rid of the memories of last night. His scent, the way his voice sounded. She could still feel her heart quake at the thought of him.

And the bond. It was still there, not budging an inch. She could still feel that he was far away but that would not be for long, she was sure. Getting up she got back into arranging her things and leaving this place before she was tracked down.

Before her mate finds her.

She began to panic; it also became harder for her to breathe and then— she heard something familiar.

Her mother's voice came to her the way it always did in moments like this.

Never let them see what you are, little fox.

Her mother always said with a smile. She had always hated that nickname as a child, too soft, too gentle for a girl who'd always felt like she was made of harder things.

But now—But now she missed it.

I didn't let them see.

She wanted to tell her mother's ghost, kneeling there in the wreckage of a life she'd have to abandon by morning.

It came out on its own. I didn't choose this.

She wondered, not for the first time, whether that excuse would have mattered to a woman who'd traded her own life to make sure Ivy never had to make a choice like that at all.

Ivy hadn't understood, at twelve, what her mother had actually done in that final hour, hands pressed to her daughter's face, blood already slicking down one arm from a wound Ivy hadn't seen inflicted.

She'd understood to only hide, run and not look back, three instructions that had kept her alive for nine years through sheer, blind obedience.

It was only later, much later, when staring at herself in cracked mirrors and wondering why she never quite looked like she belonged in her own reflection, that she'd started to suspect there was more to her mother's magic than a mother's desperate love.

She'd never confirmed it. She'd never wanted to confirm it. Confirming it meant admitting her mother's spell was still active, still working, still costing something Ivy didn't fully understand, and now that might be all for nothing as she has now been discovered by the thing her mother was hiding her from.

The bag was half-packed when she first heard it.

A snap, it was loud enough for her wolf hearing to pick up. It seems one of her mini traps had been triggered by one of the werewolves.

Someone was on the ridge.

Not close. Not yet. But close enough that any mistake would cost her everything.

Ivy froze with a shirt clutched in both hands and did the math fast, the way she'd trained herself to do it a lifetime ago.

One scent, moving at a steady, not hunting pace. Scouting, not chasing. Which means they're being careful. Possibly to not alert her. But I already know where you are.

She had two choices, the same two choices she'd had a hundred times before in smaller, less catastrophic versions of this exact moment.

Run further into the outland and possibly find a way to get into another kingdom. There she would be imprisoned, tortured and made to answer questions she knows nothing about as she would be thought to be a spy.

Or her second option is to find a way into the human world. But then for this, the portal into the human world was one she would need the blessing of the Queen or at least a Baron to aid her make it work.

But all this doesn’t matter as she needs to get out of here first before she decides on what to do next.

What if? What if he doesn’t mean to hurt me?

Ivy thought of his eyes in that clearing, a deep glaring red, sharp enough to cut, and underneath all that command, something that had looked, for one unguarded second, almost as lost as she felt. She thought of the way the whole forest had seemed to hold its breath around him, the way even her own wolf, cowed, silent, buried, had lifted its head at the sight of him like recognizing an old, half-forgotten song.

But he doesn't know who I am, she reminded herself, cinching the bag shut with hands that had finally, mercifully, stopped shaking quite so badly.

What if I am nothing more than just a mate? What if he rejects me?

Ivy went to the window instead of the door, some old habit from a life she barely remembered insisting that doors were where people expected you to be, and looked out at land she'd called home, come morning, it wouldn't be anymore.

Nine years, she thought, cataloguing the small, worn-out details of the only home she'd built for herself since the fire that had never actually happened the way she told people it had. The chipped mug she liked. The window that never quite latched right.

The floorboard by the hearth she'd loosened years ago, more out of habit than need, and never once had to use.

She is using it now. Beneath it, wrapped in an oilcloth gone soft with age, sat the only thing she'd carried out of the m******e that wasn't a memory... A small, tarnished pendant on a broken chain, its surface worn nearly smooth, etched with a mark.

Kneeling there with it pressed cold against her palm, she was holding the last physical trace of a sigil the world had spent close to a decade trying to make sure no one ever found again.

The sigil was that of a wolf camouflaging between two trees, with only a part of it being seen. The sigil of house Ashwood. The sigil of her house before her whole clan and house were massacred under the cover of night.

She knew it was the one thing she couldn't leave behind. She took it as she went through the back door. She gave one last look at the cottage before she sprinted through the woods like her life depended on it.

By the time the scent on the ridge had drawn close enough to be a genuine threat, Ivy Ashwood was already gone — bag on her back, pendant around her neck, moving through Duskmoor land with a wolf's silence and a fugitive's discipline, putting distance between herself and a bond that refused, no matter how far she walked, to fade even slightly.

She had put enough distance between her and the trackers when she decided to stop and take a breath. No matter how good of trackers there was no way they would catch up to her, as she herself had also been taught the art of tracking. She has been making sure to cover up her tracks which she was sure made it harder for them to track her.

And once she gets to the border, hopefully that would be the end of her life on the run. After she was sure that she had placed some distance between them, Ivy closed her eyes to take a breath when she heard it.

A loud howl that rattled the trees and forest.

They were close.