Iron Moon

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

IVY

"Denounce your pack, Ivy. Say the words."

My father's voice is gentle, but I can hear how much it costs him to ask this of me, because he is about to say the exact same words himself, right after I do, and none of us have ever done this before. None of us have ever had to.

We are three hours from Duskwood, parked on the shoulder of an empty road with the engine still running, because my father says the bond has to break clean and quick, like pulling a stitch before it can get infected.

"Do it, Liv." Jonah reaches back from the front seat and squeezes my hand, hard, the way he used to when we were kids and I was scared of the dark. "I know it hurts. Do it anyway."

I close my eyes. I think about my mother's grave, about the fact that I am about to cut myself off from the ground she is buried in, and my chest already aches before I say a single word.

"I, Ivy Sorren, daughter of Callum and Nora Sorren, reject my place in the Duskwood pack and walk as a rogue until claimed elsewhere."

The pack bond snaps somewhere behind my ribs, and it is worse than I imagined, a physical tearing, like something reaching into my chest and pulling a rope out through my skin. I gasp, and Jonah's hand tightens on mine, and across from me my father is already saying his own words, his voice steady even though I can see the same pain crossing his face that just crossed mine.

Then it is Jonah's turn, and when he is done, all three of us sit in a car with no pack at all, nothing behind us and nothing ahead of us except a promise from a cousin none of us has met in ten years, and a strongest Alpha north of the mountains who might not even want three strangers showing up asking for shelter.

"What if he says no?" I ask, because someone has to say it out loud.

"He will not say no." My father starts driving again. "Your mother's cousin married into that pack thirty years ago. Family means something to the Vales. It always has."

I want to believe him. I have wanted to believe a lot of things these last two years and most of them have not worked out the way I hoped.

We drive through the night and into the next day, stopping only for gas and for my father to throw all three of our phones out the window one at a time so Draven cannot track us, which feels like watching pieces of my old life get left on the side of the road, small and replaceable, already forgotten by the world I used to live in.

By the second afternoon the land starts to change. Flat fields give way to hills, then mountains, real ones, with snow still sitting on the peaks even though it is nearly summer everywhere else. The forest gets thicker, darker, older somehow, like it has been standing there longer than anything Draven's pack ever built.

"We're close," my father says, and I feel it before he even finishes the sentence, a pull low in my stomach that has nothing to do with hunger or nerves, something that feels like my own wolf sitting up and taking notice of something none of the rest of me can name yet.

I roll my window down without deciding to. Cold clean air rushes in, pine and stone and something underneath it, warm, rich, a scent I do not have a word for because I have never smelled anything like it in my life. For one second I see something enormous move between the trees, fast, gone before I can even be sure I saw it at all, and my heart slams so hard against my ribs that Jonah turns around to check on me.

"You okay?"

"I saw something." My voice comes out strange. "Something big."

"Probably a warrior on patrol," my father says, but he is watching the tree line too now, careful, and I notice he has slowed the car without being asked.

We round a bend and four men step out onto the road ahead of us, blocking the way. Two of them are clearly warriors, broad and alert, hands loose at their sides in a way that tells me they could move in half a second if they needed to. The other two are bigger. Much bigger. One of them so tall he makes the warrior standing next to him look ordinary by comparison, and something about the way he holds himself, still and coiled and absolutely certain of his own ground, makes every hair on my arms stand up.

He does not look at our car. Not once. It is strange enough that I notice it, the way you notice someone working very hard not to do something.

My father tells us to stay put and gets out alone. I watch through the windshield as he crosses to the smaller of the two big men, and they talk for a minute before shaking hands, and then my father is led toward the tallest one, the one who still has not looked our way, and they exchange words I cannot hear from here.

"That's him," Jonah says quietly. "Has to be. Look at the way the warriors are standing around him. That's an Alpha."

I watch the man's back, broad enough to block out the road behind him, and I feel that same pull in my stomach again, sharper this time, like something inside me is straining toward him even though I have not seen his face and do not know his name.

I do not like it. I do not like feeling anything reach for someone without my permission. I spent two years building a wall around exactly this kind of feeling, brick by brick, after Bastian tore the first one down in front of the whole pack, and some invisible pull in my chest does not get to knock a hole in that wall just because it wants to.

My father comes back to the car smiling, actually smiling, for the first time in three days.

"That was the Beta, Silas, and the Alpha himself," he says, getting back behind the wheel. "We were lucky he was out running the border. Silas will lead us in, the Alpha's gone ahead to meet us at the pack house."

"He never looked at us once," I say.

My father's smile flickers, just slightly, something careful crossing his face the same way it did back home when he first mentioned Frostbind.

"No," he agrees. "He did not."

I do not understand it. Not yet. I will not understand it until we are standing in the middle of a pack house full of strangers, until a shadow falls over me and I turn around and look up into a pair of storm grey eyes that seem to know something about me that I do not know about myself, and every wall I built over the last two years cracks straight down the middle in less time than it takes me to remember to breathe.

But that is still an hour away. Right now, all I know is that somewhere out there, a man big enough to make the ground feel smaller refused to look at me even once, and somehow that scares me more than anything Alpha Draven ever said to my face.