Iron Moon

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

IVY

"Say yes, and no one else has to get hurt tonight."

Alpha Draven says it like he is doing me a favor. Like he is not standing in the middle of my father's living room with two warriors behind him, like this is a normal Tuesday and not the night my whole life gets decided for me.

I do not answer. I learned two years ago what happens when I open my mouth in front of this man.

"Ivy." My father's voice is low, warning me to stay calm. He is standing between me and Draven, but I can see his hands shaking at his sides, and my father's hands never shake. Not when rogues attacked our border last winter. Not when he buried my mother with his own hands because he would not let anyone else touch her.

They are shaking now.

"I already have a mate," I say, because it is the only card I have left, even though we both know it is a card that does not work anymore.

Draven laughs. It is not a kind sound. "Bastian rejected you in front of the whole pack. You think that bond still counts for anything?"

It does not. I know it does not. A rejected mate never gets a second bond unless the wolf who broke it dies, and Bastian is very much alive, probably somewhere in this pack house right now pretending he cannot hear his father humiliating me a second time.

"I am seventeen," I say instead, even though that is not true either, not for one more week.

"You turn eighteen in seven days." Draven's eyes move over me the way they have been moving over me since I was fifteen years old, since before I understood what that look meant. "I have been very patient, Ivy. More patient than I have been with anyone in my life. I lost my mate. I am owed a Luna. And you are the strongest, most beautiful thing this pack has produced in a generation."

My stomach turns over. I do not want to be owed to anyone.

"She is a child," my father says, and his voice cracks on the word, not from weakness, from fury he is barely holding back.

"She will not be, in seven days." Draven steps closer, and I feel my wolf claw up under my skin, wanting out, wanting to fight, and I have to breathe through my teeth to keep her down because if I shift in this house, if I so much as growl at an Alpha, my father and my brother die for it before I finish the thought.

I have trained every single day since I was seven years old. I can put a grown warrior on his back in under a minute. I have sparred with my brother until we both bled and neither of us stopped first. None of it matters right now, standing in my own living room, because strength does not save you from a man who owns the ground you are standing on.

"I will give your family until the full moon to accept my offer with grace," Draven says, straightening his jacket like he has already won. "After that, I will simply take what is mine."

He looks at me one more time, the kind of look that makes my skin want to crawl off my body, and then he turns and walks out with his warriors trailing behind him like shadows.

The door closes. The silence after is worse than his voice.

"Dad." My brother Jonah comes down the stairs two at a time, and I realize he must have been standing at the top the whole time, listening, his hands curled into fists. "Dad, we are not doing this."

"I know." My father is already moving, already pulling a bag down from the hall closet, the kind of bag we have never used because we have never needed to run before. "Ivy, go pack. Only what matters. We leave tonight."

"Leave and go where?" My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "Dad, this is Duskwood. This is our pack. Mom is buried here."

My father stops with his hand on the closet door, and for one second I see the exact same grief on his face that I have seen every night since I was twelve years old, since the night rogues tore through our border and my mother threw herself between them and a line of children she did not even know, because that was who she was, and it cost her everything.

"Your mother did not die so a man like Draven could own her daughter," he says. "We are leaving. Tonight. Pack your bag."

I go upstairs because there is nothing else to do, because my father has never once been wrong when his voice sounds like that, and I sit on my bed for one full minute before I let myself shake.

Two years ago Bastian Ashcombe stood in the middle of the training circle, in front of every wolf I grew up with, and rejected me as his mate because his father told him to. I remember the exact words. I remember the way the whole pack went quiet and then started whispering before he had even finished the sentence. I remember walking home alone because Jonah had to hold our father back from putting his fist through Alpha Draven's jaw.

I told myself that day that I would never again let a man decide what I was worth.

Now I am packing a bag in the middle of the night because another man has decided exactly that, and there is nothing I can do about it except run.

I pack fast. Clothes, the knife my mother gave me, the photograph of her that sits on my nightstand, the boots I have worn through three summers of training. I do not cry. I promised myself two years ago I would not cry over what these men decide to do with my life, and I am not about to break that promise tonight, even with my hands shaking so hard I can barely close the zipper.

When I come back downstairs, Jonah has weapons laid out on the kitchen table, actual blades, which we never carry because wolves do not need them, we are weapons ourselves. Seeing them there makes this real in a way Draven's voice never could.

"Where are we going?" I ask again.

My father looks up, and for the first time all night, something like hope crosses his face.

"Your mother had a family," he says. "A pack up north. Frostbind. Strongest territory this side of the mountains, ruled by an Alpha nobody crosses. If we can get there and get you claimed as pack before Draven even knows which direction we went, he cannot touch you. Not without starting a war he cannot win."

"An Alpha nobody crosses," I repeat. "That sounds like trading one monster for another."

My father's face goes strange then, careful in a way I do not understand yet.

"Ronan Vale is not Draven," he says quietly. "Whatever else he is, I promise you that."

I do not know what he means by it. I will not understand until three days from now, standing on a dirt road at the edge of a forest I have never seen, when a wall of a man steps out of the trees and looks at me like the ground just moved under both our feet, and something in my chest answers him before my mind has any say in it at all.

But that is three days away. Tonight, I zip my bag, I do not cry, and I walk out of the only home I have ever known without looking back once, because looking back has never once helped me survive anything.

We are on the road by midnight. None of us speak. I watch Duskwood disappear in the side mirror, and somewhere behind us, I know Draven is sleeping soundly, already counting the seven days until he thinks he owns me.

He has no idea we are already gone.

What none of us know yet, not my father, not my brother, not me, is that Draven has eyes further than our border, and that by the time we cross into Frostbind territory, he will already know exactly which pack took us in.