UNBOUND: THE ALPHA'S SECOND VOW

Ivy's POV I remember the smell of pine smoke and crushed grass the night my whole life ended. Three hundred wolves stood in a circle around us, waiting to watch me become a Luna. I was twenty-three. I wore a white dress my mother sewed by hand, and I believed, stupidly, that Damian Voss loved me. He didn't say it loud. He didn't need to. An Alpha's rejection carries on the wind whether he shouts it or whispers it, and every wolf in that clearing heard it the same way I did, like a bone breaking exactly where it had healed once. "I reject you, Ivy Calloway. You will never be my Luna." I felt it happen inside my chest before my mind caught up. A tearing. A hollowing. My knees buckled. The ground came up to me, and I was on the ground in the dirt in my mother's white dress while three hundred people watched their future Luna crumble like she was nothing. Damian didn't look at me. That was the part nobody talks about, not the rejection itself, but the way he turned his back before I even hit the ground. Like I'd already stopped existing. I don't remember leaving the clearing. I remember Marcus's arms, and the sound of my own breathing, ragged and wrong, like my lungs had forgotten their job. And I remember thinking, somewhere under the pain, I would never let anyone see me like this again. That was two years ago. Tonight I'm standing in the marble lobby of the Meridian Tribunal Building in a gray suit that cost more than my mother's entire wedding, and nobody in this city knows that the sharp-tongued attorney they call "Calloway" once collapsed in the dirt for a man who couldn't be bothered to watch her fall. "You're doing the face again," Marcus says beside me, adjusting his tie for the fourth time. He hates suits. He hates tribunal buildings more. But he's been my shadow since the night he carried me out of that clearing, and he hasn't left since. “What face?” "The one where you look like you're about to eat someone's throat out." "I'm about to walk into a courtroom and argue that Blackthorn Pack's inheritance laws are illegal under Five Packs treaty code. Eating a throat might actually be faster." He almost smiles. Almost. Marcus doesn't like it when I joke about Blackthorn. He was there too, that night. He remembers the dress. I check my folder one more time the Halloway coalition's case: seventeen omega families fighting laws that treat their children like property instead of people. I don't let myself think about whose pack these laws belong to. Three years ago, kneeling in that dirt before Marcus got me back on my feet, I made a promise to myself. I would become someone the packs couldn't ignore. I would use the very system that broke me to break it back. I did not, however, plan on this particular case dragging me back to Blackthorn territory. I didn't plan on him being in this building at all. The lobby's security desk runs silver-detection scanners disguised as ordinary metal detectors, standard in every mixed human-shifter building in Meridian, and the reason a pack Alpha's guards have to check in like anyone else instead of muscling through the front doors. I clear it without thinking, the way I do every morning. I don't know yet that it's the last unremarkable thing that will happen to me today. The elevator doors open on the fourth floor, and there he is. Damian Voss. Three years had sanded him down to something harder, broader through the shoulders, his jaw set tighter, silver threading his temples like frost that came early. He's in Alpha black, the kind of formal that says pack business, and for one second our eyes meet across the lobby and the noise drops out like someone cut the audio. Something under my ribs, right where the old scar sits, the one that flares silver when I'm furious or afraid, gives a slow, deep pull, like a hook sinking into old scar tissue. That shouldn't happen. Rejection bonds don't do that. Rejection bonds are supposed to be dead. He goes pale. His gaze drops away, hunted, not to my face, but past my shoulder, to the folder tucked under my arm. To the name typed neatly on the case tab. In the Matter of: Halloway Coalition v. Blackthorn Pack, Beneficiary: Wren Calloway. His whole body locks. "Ivy." My name in his mouth sounds like something breaking. I don't answer him. I can't. My heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in my throat, because I already know, the way you know a storm has arrived before the first drop of rain, that he has just read my daughter's name on a legal document, and he is doing math I never wanted him to do. The elevator behind me dings. Marcus's hand closes around my elbow, steady, urgent. "Ivy," Damian says again. This time his voice cracks clean down the middle. "is she mine?" I don't answer. I can't. And that silence is its own answer. I watch him read it on my face in the half-second before the fire alarm shreds the air apart, red lights spinning, the whole lobby dissolving into shouting bodies and slamming doors, and somewhere in the chaos, somebody screams that there's smoke on the seventh floor, right above the room where seventeen omega families are waiting for me to walk in and save their children