Cursed With Desire For The Alpha I Swore To Kill

Ivana's POV My knuckles split open on the twelfth punch, and I still didn't stop.The sandbag swung back at me, heavy and stupid, and I hit it again because it couldn't talk back, couldn't look at me the way Rhea had looked at me last night. *I wish I'd died with them so I wouldn't be stuck with you*. Fifteen years of training and I still hadn't figured out how to hit something hard enough to make those words stop ringing. Smoke. That was the first thing that came back, always. Not my mother's face, not my father's voice — smoke, thick and sweet with burning thatch, filling a seven-year-old's lungs until she couldn't tell if she was screaming or just trying to breathe.*Run, Ivy. Don't look back*.I hadn't listened. That was the whole problem, wasn't it. Fifteen years later and the entire clan still knew me by the one thing I didn't do."Ivy!"I didn't turn around fast enough to hide the sweat, the blood on my hands, the wildness I knew was still sitting in my eyes. Toren stood in the doorway of the training barn, young enough that he still flinched when I looked at him straight on. Good. Let him flinch. It kept people at a distance, and distance was the only thing that had ever kept me upright."Yes?" "The council's asking for you." His throat worked around the words like they tasted bad. "Elder Corvin said now."I wiped my hands on my thighs, leaving twin smears of red, and didn't bother apologizing for the state of me. They'd seen worse. They'd made worse.The meeting house used to be my house. I still remembered the exact place on the floor where our dinner table had stood, before the clan gutted the building and turned it into a room for old men to decide who lived and who got sent to die slow. Every time I walked in, some small, stupid part of me expected to smell my mother's cooking instead of candle tallow and years of nervous sweat.Elder Corvin didn't look up from his cup when I stepped inside. He let me stand there. He always let me stand there — thirty seconds, sometimes a full minute, just to remind me whose patience I was living on."Ivy." He said my name like he was tasting whether I'd earned it yet. "Do you know how long it's been?" "Fifteen years, Elder Corvin." "Fifteen years since you led the wolves straight through the heart of this pack." His eyes finally came up, pale and flat, no more feeling in them than a man reading off a grocery list. "Fifteen years since you watched your mother die because you couldn't do one thing right. Do you remember what we promised each other that night?"I remembered everything about that night. That was the curse of it — I couldn't forget a single second, not the color of the fire, not the sound my father's shoulder made when the black wolf's jaw closed on it, not my mother's eyes finding mine across a clearing full of teeth and telling me, without a single word, run."You promised I'd have the chance to fix it," I said."And have you? Fixed it?"There it was. The trap they always built the same way, so familiar by now I could've drawn the blueprint. Say yes, and I was arrogant, claiming a victory I hadn't earned. Say no, and I was still that useless seven-year-old who let go of nothing but the one thing that mattered."No, Elder. Not yet."Something that might have been satisfaction moved through his face and was gone. He set his cup down with a click that echoed too loud in the empty room. "Fifteen years we've fed you. Housed you. Poured everything this clan has left into turning a frightened little girl into something that could walk into Duskmoor territory and not get torn apart in the first hour. Fifteen years, Ivana, and you come back to us tonight with blood on your hands from a sandbag."Heat crawled up my neck. I let it. Better they saw anger than the truth, which was that some nights the sandbag was the only thing standing between me and the woods, between me and running until my legs gave out just to feel like I was seven again and could still be caught before it was too late."I'm ready," I said. "Give me the order and I'll take it."Corvin studied me the way he might study a knife he wasn't sure had been sharpened evenly. Behind him, two other elders sat in the shadows I hadn't bothered to notice — Meira, whose daughter had bled out in the square that night, and old Bastian, who'd lost his whole litter. Meira's eyes on me were the ones that always cut deepest. Not hatred. Something worse. Disappointment that had calcified into habit."The Duskmoor Alpha takes a mate this season," Corvin said. "There will be a gathering. Neutral ground, every pack within three territories invited to send a delegate to be considered."My stomach dropped somewhere south of my boots. "You're not sending me as a delegate.""We're sending you as bait, as blade, as whatever gets you close enough to that family to finish what they started." He finally smiled, and it was worse than his silence. "You've spent fifteen years learning to move like one of them, fight like one of them, lie like one of them. Now you're going to walk into their territory smiling, and you're going to make their Alpha fall in love with the thing that's going to kill him."The room went very quiet. Even the candles seemed to hold still."And if he doesn't fall for it?" I asked, because some reckless piece of me needed to hear him say the rest out loud."Then you'll find another way in." Corvin rose, joints cracking, and for a second the powerful man who'd sentenced a child to a lifetime of penance looked simply old. "You said you're ready, Ivana. Prove it. Bring us the head of those wolves who killed your mother, or don't bother coming home at all."I thought of Rhea's face last night, twisted with a grief she'd turned into a weapon against the only family she had left. I thought of my mother's eyes in that clearing, telling me to run one last time.I wasn't seven anymore. I wouldn't turn around this time."When do I leave," I said, and it wasn't a question.