The Alpha Who Let Me Go

Chapter 3: The Boy With My Eyes

Ivy's POV

Four years old and already fighting his cousins for the last piece of bread at breakfast. That was my son, every single morning, and most mornings it made me laugh so hard I nearly choked on my coffee.

"Milo Marsh, put your cousin down," I said, not even looking up from packing my training bag.

"He started it," Milo announced, releasing his cousin from a headlock that was frankly impressive for a four-year-old.

"I don't care who started it. I care who's finishing my breakfast without a fight in it."

He grinned up at me — that same stubborn, sure-of-himself grin he'd had since he was old enough to have expressions at all — and for just a second, the way the morning light hit his face, I saw something that still, after four years, made my chest ache in a way I never told anyone about.

Storm-grey eyes. Not mine. Not anyone else's in our family.

His.

I pushed the thought down the way I'd trained myself to, folded it up small and put it back where it belonged — in the part of my chest I didn't open anymore. I had built an entire life out of not opening that part of my chest. It had taken years. I wasn't about to undo it over a look in my own son's eyes at breakfast.

"Eat fast," I told Milo. "Uncle Grant's dropping you at the pack nursery. I've got border business today."

"Boring business," Milo said, but he ate fast anyway, because even at four he understood that when I used my Beta voice, arguing wasn't really an option.

Becoming Beta of Hollow Pine hadn't been handed to me. I'd earned it the hard way, training until my knuckles split and healed and split again, until the pack that took me in broken and pregnant five years ago started looking at me like I was someone worth following instead of someone to pity. My grandmother — alive, it turned out, and Hollow Pine's own retired Beta — had trained me herself, merciless and patient in equal measure, until the girl who threw up in the dirt after a public rejection became a woman who could hold her own against wolves twice her size.

I never told anyone in the pack, outside of Grant and my grandmother, exactly who Milo's father was. Hollow Pine knew an Alpha had rejected me. They didn't know which one. It was safer that way — for me, and especially for Milo.

"You've got the border meeting at noon," Grant said, appearing in my kitchen doorway with his usual scowl, the one he'd worn permanently since the night he drove me out of Ashworth territory. "Timber dispute. Should be simple. In, out, back before dinner."

"Should be," I agreed, strapping my training bag over my shoulder. "Nothing about pack business is ever simple."

"You want me to come?"

"I'm Beta, Grant. I can handle a timber dispute."

He studied me for a long second, the way he still did sometimes, like he was checking for cracks in something he'd spent five years helping me rebuild. "I know you can. Doesn't mean I like you doing it alone."

"I'm not doing it alone. I'm doing it with two guards and every ounce of training you and Grandma beat into me."

That got the smallest twitch of a smile out of him. Small victories.

Milo tugged my sleeve on his way out the door with Grant, looking up at me with that grin again. "Bring me something from the border, Mom."

"It's a timber dispute, not a shopping trip."

"Bring me something anyway."

I laughed and kissed the top of his head, and I watched him go with Grant toward the nursery, and I had absolutely no idea, standing in my own kitchen with a training bag over my shoulder, that I was about to walk my son's face directly into the one person on earth I'd spent five years making sure never found out he existed.

By the time I reached the border line at noon, the Ashworth delegation was already waiting on the other side of the marker stones. Three figures. Two guards.

And one impossibly tall man in the center, arms crossed, storm-grey eyes locking onto mine across the clearing with a look that stopped my entire body cold.

Kade Ashworth hadn't changed in five years. If anything, he looked bigger, harder, more like the mountain I remembered from the worst night of my life.

I made myself walk forward anyway. I made myself remember every promise I'd sworn in that car five years ago.

"Beta Marsh," he said, and his voice cracked slightly on the second word, like it cost him something to say it. "It's been a long time."

"Alpha Ashworth." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "Let's keep this about the timber line."

His eyes flicked, just once, past my shoulder — toward the tree line behind me, where Grant had insisted on parking close enough to watch, with Milo strapped in the back seat because the nursery run had been delayed and Grant hadn't wanted to leave him waiting alone.

I watched Kade's whole face change in real time. Watched the color drain out of it, watched something violent and disbelieving c***k across features that had been carved out of stone a second before.

"Ivy," he said, and this time his voice didn't sound steady at all. "Whose son is that?"