UNBOUND: THE ALPHA'S SECOND VOW

CHAPTER THREE

Ivy's POV

I don't remember the cab ride home.

I remember gripping the door handle so hard my knuckles went white, and Marcus in the front seat barking directions at a driver who couldn't go fast enough, and my own voice on the phone with the nanny, low and controlled in a way that cost me everything I had.

"Is she awake?"

"Sleeping. Temp's one-oh-two.

I gave her the medicine like you showed me."

"The wolf. Describe it."

"Big. Dark gray, almost black. Just... sitting at the treeline. Not doing anything. It's been there twenty minutes."

Twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes a strange wolf has been sitting outside my house while my daughter burns with fever inside it, and I am forty minutes away trapped in traffic with smoke still clinging to my hair.

By the time we pull up, the sun is dropping low and orange behind the trees, and I'm out of the cab before it fully stops, running up the gravel path in heels I kick off halfway there.

The porch light snaps on, motion-sensor, installed the year I filed for an independent residence registry proof, on paper, that I didn't need a pack's protection to keep my own house standing.

Some nights that paperwork feels like the only wall I have.

Tonight it doesn't feel like enough at all.

The wolf is gone from the treeline, but the grass is flattened where it sat, a wide, deliberate print pressed into the mud, facing the house.

Facing Wren's window.

Inside, my daughter is a small, hot weight in my arms, her dark curls damp against her forehead, her breath too fast.

She's not shifted she's two, she won't for years yet but even human-small and feverish, she has her father's stubborn chin and it guts me every single time I look at her.

"Mama," she mumbles, not really awake.

"I'm here, baby. I'm here."

I hold her until the fever breaks a little past midnight, until her breathing evens out and her small fist finally unclenches from my collar.

Marcus stands guard at the window the whole night, silent, armed with nothing but his own wolf and a lot of stubbornness, and neither of us says the thing we're both thinking.

Blackthorn scouts don't sit outside a stranger's house for twenty minutes by accident.

At three in the morning, my phone lights up on the nightstand.

Unknown number.

Blackthorn area code.

I almost don't answer.

I answer anyway.

Not knowing is worse than knowing, it has always been worse, that's the whole reason I became a lawyer instead of curling up and disappearing three years ago.

"Ivy."

His voice, rough with no sleep, low enough that I know he's trying not to wake someone or trying not to be overheard.

"I need you to know something before the hearing tomorrow."

"It's three in the morning, Damian."

"I sent a scout to your house tonight."

No apology.

Just fact.

"Not to threaten you. To protect her. I've had two threats crossed my desk this month from Ashford loyalists who don't want land-law reform to go through. They'd use a child to stop it, if they thought it won't work."

Something in my chest goes very still and very quiet, the calm before I do something I'll regret.

"She is not a Blackthorn pup. She is my daughter, and you don't get to send wolves to my house without asking."

"I know."

The line goes quiet long enough that I check the screen to make sure the call hasn't dropped.

"I know I don't have that right. I gave it up two years ago in a clearing in front of three hundred witnesses, and I have thought about that mistake more days than I haven't, Ivy, and I am not calling to ask forgiveness for it, because I don't think there's a version of forgiveness I've earned yet."

I sit down hard on the edge of my bed, my legs folding under me, my daughter's fevered warmth still a phantom weight against my chest.

"Then why are you calling."

"Because tomorrow, in that tribunal room, I am going to have to look at the inheritance filing with my own eyes, in front of my own council, in front of Selene's father and the law as it currently stands gives me the right to claim her the second paternity is confirmed on record. Full custody rights. No say from you at all."

His breath catches.

"I need you to know, before that happens in a room full of people who are already looking for reasons to unseat me I am not going to exercise that right. Whatever else I am, Ivy, I am not going to do that to you. Or to her."

I don't believe him.

I can't afford to believe him, not with two years of silence and a rejection scar and a wolf's print pressed into the mud outside my daughter's window as proof of exactly how much control he still thinks he has over my life.

"Prove it," I say.

My voice comes out steadier than I feel.

"Don't tell me. File it.”

“File a formal renunciation of claim before the hearing opens, in writing, on record, where Selene's faction and your own council can all see it where you can't take it back later when it's politically convenient."

Silence stretches so long I think the call dropped.

"Damian?"

"If I file that," he says slowly, like each word costs him blood, "before the vote on the merger I hand Selene's faction everything they need to argue I'm unfit to lead a merger negotiation.”

His voice turned bitter.

“They'll say I can't even manage my own house, let alone a treaty. They could move to unseat me before the full moon."

"Then I guess we'll find out what you actually value more," I say, "your title, or her."

I hang up before he can answer, because I already know that whatever he says next, I won't be able to trust it and because Wren stirs against the pillow beside me, murmuring something in her sleep, and I need both hands free to hold my daughter, not to hold my breath waiting on a man who has broken his promises to me exactly once before, in front of three hundred witnesses, without so much as a backward glance.

I press my hand flat against the cold glass.

Somewhere out past the treeline, something shifts, low and deliberate and the scar on my collarbone answers it, a struck tuning fork somewhere behind my sternum.

For the first time in three years, I can't tell if what I'm feeling is fear of him, or something with his name on it that never actually died.