The Alpha Who Let Me Go

Chapter 6: The Vigil

POV: Kade

I have never been afraid of anything in my life. Not until I watched a doctor press two fingers to Ivy Marsh's throat and count seconds like they might run out before she finished breathing.

"Pulse is steady," Dr. Alden said, not looking up from her chart. "She lost blood, but the shift healed most of the muscle damage already. She'll wake when her body's ready and not a second before. Alpha, you need to let go of the bed rail. You're bending the metal."

I looked down. My hand had gone white-knuckled around the infirmary bed frame, and sure enough, the steel had started to bow under my grip like it was made of tin. I made myself let go, one finger at a time, the way you'd talk down a wolf that didn't want to be talked down.

"How long," I said. Not a question, really. A demand dressed up as one, because I didn't have the patience left in me for anything softer.

"Hours. Maybe a day." Dr. Alden finally looked at me, and something in her face softened in a way I didn't like, because it meant she felt sorry for me, and I didn't want to be a man anyone felt sorry for. "You should eat something. Sleep, even. I can have someone sit with her."

"No."

She didn't argue. Nobody in my pack argued with me anymore, not since I was twenty-one and put my first challenger in the ground without breaking a sweat. It used to feel like power. Standing in that infirmary, staring down at the torn line of stitches along Ivy's shoulder — a wound she took protecting our son from something that had come for him because of who I was — it felt like exactly nothing at all. All the strength in three territories, and I couldn't have stopped that wolf's teeth from finding her a half-second sooner. I could only make sure there wasn't a second bite.

Milo was curled up in the chair beside the bed, small and fierce even asleep, one hand fisted in the blanket that had slid halfway off him. Somebody — Grant, probably, before he'd stormed off to argue with my council about jurisdiction — had tucked a second blanket around his shoulders. I hadn't moved him. I told myself it was because I didn't want to wake him. The truth was simpler and more embarrassing: I didn't trust myself not to hold on too tight if I picked him up, four years too late for every time I should have been the one tucking him in.

I pulled a chair to the other side of the bed and sat down across from my son, with Ivy unconscious between us, and let myself do the thing I hadn't let myself do in five years.

I looked. Really looked. At all of it.

She'd changed more than I expected, and less than I feared. The softness I remembered from that one firelit night was gone, burned off somewhere in five years of training I hadn't been there to see. There was a thin scar along her collarbone that hadn't been there before — old, healed, the kind you got from a real fight, not a training bout. Her hands, even slack with sleep, had calluses across the knuckles that told me exactly how she'd spent the years I'd spent building an empire out of guilt.

I did that. Not the scar itself. But the years that made it necessary — the fact that she'd had to become someone who could survive rogue wolves at a border crossing because the man who was supposed to stand between her and every danger in the world had told her, in front of a hundred witnesses, that she wasn't worth keeping.

"You're doing the thing," said a voice from the doorway, and I didn't need to turn around to know it was my grandmother. Rosalind Ashworth had a way of announcing her disapproval before she'd even finished forming a sentence.

"What thing," I said, not moving my eyes off Ivy's face.

"Punishing yourself somewhere I can watch." She came further into the room, leaning more heavily on her cane than she used to, though she'd bite through her own tongue before admitting it hurt. Her eyes went to Milo first — lingered there, something complicated moving behind her expression — and then to Ivy. "The doctor says she'll live."

"The doctor says a lot of things. None of them explain why three coordinated wolves attacked a car with a child in it at our border."

"No," Rosalind agreed. "They don't."

I finally looked at her. "You know something."

"I know that this pack has enemies who would very much like to see the Ashworth bloodline weakened, embarrassed, or dead," she said, carefully, the way she talked when she was choosing every word like a chess move. "I know that word travels fast when an Alpha's rejected mate reappears five years later with a son who shares his eyes. I know that in certain circles, that kind of information is worth a great deal to the right buyer."

"You think someone sold us out. Sold them out."

"I think," Rosalind said, "that you should ask yourself who benefits from Ivy Marsh and your son being dead, injured, or afraid enough to run before they ever got a chance to matter to this pack." She looked at me for a long moment, something in her face I hadn't seen from her in years — not since before she'd made me stand at a fire pit and destroy the best thing that had ever happened to me. "I was wrong, Kade. About her. I think I've known it for longer than I've been willing to say out loud."

I didn't trust myself to answer that. Five years of anger had a lot of momentum behind it, and I wasn't ready to let it go just because my grandmother had finally decided, half a decade too late, to admit what it had cost.

"Get some rest," she said instead, when I said nothing. "Both of them will need you steady when they wake. Not hollowed out from sitting in a chair for two days straight."

She left. I didn't move.

Somewhere around the second hour of silence, Milo stirred in his sleep, made a small unhappy sound, and — without waking up — reached one hand out blindly across the space between the chair and the bed until his fingers found the edge of Ivy's blanket and gripped it, like even asleep some part of him needed to be sure she was still there.

I sat there and watched a four-year-old boy anchor himself to his mother in his sleep, and understood, with a clarity that felt like being struck, exactly how much of his life I had already missed. First steps. First words. Every fever, every nightmare, every scraped knee that Ivy had knelt down and fixed alone, because I hadn't given her any other choice.

"I'm sorry," I said out loud, to a room where neither of them could hear me, because it was easier to say when it didn't have to survive being heard. "I don't expect either of you to forgive me for it. I just need you both to be all right. Whatever it costs. Whatever you decide about me after — I need you both to be all right first."

Milo's hand tightened on the blanket like he'd heard me anyway.

Ivy didn't stir. Not yet.

I stayed in that chair through the night, through the changing of the guard outside the infirmary door, through Dr. Alden's quiet check-ins every hour that grew less worried each time she read the monitor. I stayed when my Beta came to tell me the council wanted answers about the attack, and I stayed when he came back an hour later to tell me Hollow Pine's council had sent a formal demand for Ivy and Milo's immediate return, and I stayed when he told me, third time, voice careful, that Grant Marsh was currently in the outer hall refusing to be turned away and getting louder about it by the minute.

"Let him in," I said, because some things you don't get to run from, and Grant Marsh's fury was one of them.

The door opened. Grant filled the frame, chest heaving like he'd run the whole way from wherever the council meeting had been, eyes blazing straight past me to the bed where his sister lay pale against the pillows.

"You," he said, and the word came out low, dangerous, nothing like the controlled diplomacy he'd used at the border. "You have exactly one minute to explain to me why my sister is unconscious in Ashworth territory, why my nephew is asleep in an Ashworth infirmary chair, and why the Hollow Pine council is one vote away from declaring this an act of aggression."

I stood up slowly, keeping my voice level even though every instinct in me wanted to match his volume. "She was protecting our son from an attack meant for both of us. She's alive because of it. That's the truth, whether your council wants to hear it or not."

"My council," Grant said, "wants to hear why an unmarked convoy of mercenaries knew exactly which car to hit at a border meeting that only five people knew the details of. Two of them were mine. Three of them were yours, Kade." His eyes were hard, unblinking. "So before you stand there and act like the wounded party, you might want to consider that somebody on your side of that border line is the reason my sister has stitches in her shoulder."

The accusation landed somewhere in my chest and stayed there, cold and sharp, because I couldn't immediately tell him he was wrong.

"I intend to find out exactly who," I said. "And when I do, they'll answer for it."

"You'll forgive me," Grant said, voice like ice, "if I don't wait around to see whether that's true."

He crossed the room to Milo's chair, gentle in a way that startled me after the fury in his voice a second before, and lifted my sleeping son into his arms without waking him.

"What are you doing," I said, and it came out rougher than I intended.

"Taking my nephew somewhere safe," Grant said, already turning for the door, "because right now, the safest place for him is anywhere that isn't standing this close to you."