Cursed With Desire For The Alpha I Swore To Kill

Chapter 2: A Renewed Purpose

Ivana's POV

"You will be our Luna, Ivy."I heard the words and still didn't understand them, the way you can stare at a word on a page too long until it stops looking like a word at all. Elder Marrow's eyes didn't blink, didn't soften, didn't do anything but wait for me to react the way he expected.I'd spent fifteen years wanting exactly two things. To stop being the reason this clan buried its dead. And to get Rhea somewhere she could walk down a street without children spitting at her feet. Not once, not for one single second in fifteen years, had I let myself want a crown that used to sit on my parents' heads."I don't understand," I said, and the room went so quiet I could hear the candle wax dripping."If you succeed." Marrow said it slower this time, like I was slow, like grief had eaten the part of my brain that processed language. "If you erase every Alpha bloodline in Duskmoor, root and branch, you'll be crowned queen the day my son takes the throne. I'm giving you Callum. He becomes Alpha King once Duskmoor falls. You stand beside him as Luna.""Callum." My mouth had gone dry. "He's coming with me?"I asked it carefully, because I already knew the answer would be no, and because the thought of Callum on this mission made something in my chest curdle. Callum was good at plenty of things. Warming my bed on the nights the nightmares got bad, keeping that particular secret quiet enough that his mother still called me that girl to my face. War was not one of his talents. Neither, most days, was thinking."How dare you speak first!""Can you imagine the nerve of this girl!""Why should the future Alpha clean up a mess she made?"Callum's mother was the loudest of them, her chair scraping back as she rose halfway out of her seat, eyes cutting into me like she could carve the answer out of my skin. "I said years ago we should have thrown her and her sister to the Duskmoor wolves ourselves and saved the clan the trouble."So that was the arithmetic. Marry me off, dangle a crown, and hope I'd hand her son a kingdom without a single Duskmoor claw ever touching him.Marrow lifted one hand and the room dropped silent like he'd cut a wire. "No, Ivy. You go alone. Your task is simple — deliver Duskmoor into our hands. Kill everyone who stands in the way. Especially the Alpha King." His voice had lowered into something I felt in my back teeth more than heard, and the whole room seemed to lean toward it, hungry.I kept my spine straight. Feet apart. A soldier taking orders, not a girl being sentenced."They come every year." He was rising now, hands flat on the table like he needed it to hold him up. "Burn what we've built. Take our people. Then go home to their fat pastures and their warm beds and sleep like men with clean hands." Nobody in that room argued with him. I didn't either. He wasn't wrong, and the old anger in my chest — the one that never fully banked, just smoldered — caught again at the words."The details are simple enough." Elder Mattias picked it up smooth as a relay baton, like they'd rehearsed whose voice carried which part. "You'll build yourself a new name, work your way into the Alpha's confidence, learn what frightens him. At the ceremony, you'll put a document in front of him — one we'll prepare — that opens their ranks to us." He slammed both palms on the table hard enough to rattle the cups. "Then, on our signal. The Alpha. His Beta. Every warrior worth the name. Cut the bloodline out at the root.""Fail us," Marrow said, "and your sister pays for it. Don't mistake fifteen years of training for leverage, Ivana. We built the knife. We can still break it."Rhea's name was the only thing keeping my knees locked. She was the reason I'd swallowed every slap, every whispered murderer trailing me through the square, every night I went to bed on an empty stomach so she wouldn't have to. If I failed, they wouldn't touch me first. They'd touch her."I won't fail."Marrow nodded like that had never been in doubt. "Good. Say your goodbyes. You leave tonight."

***

Packing took no time — I'd learned young how to live out of nothing, how to disappear into a bag I could carry at a dead run. Telling Rhea took longer than I had."Rhea." I knocked. Waited. Knocked again. "We need to talk."Nothing. I pushed the door open anyway.She was curled in the window seat, and I didn't need to ask what she'd been crying about — I could see it from the doorway, her age-mates laughing somewhere below in the dark, a life she wasn't invited into."Did I say you could come in?" "I'm leaving tonight, Rhea."That got her attention. Her head turned, slow, like she didn't trust her own ears. "You're — leaving?" "The council's sending me to Duskmoor. A mission. If I finish it, everything gets wiped clean. What they say I owe them. What they think I owe you." "Take me with you." "Rhea—" "I can't stay here without you!" She was already up, already dragging a bag out from under her bed, throwing things into it with hands that shook. "Please, Ivy. Please." "They won't allow it." I reached for her and she went rigid under my hands, and I understood, the way I always understood her anger even when it landed on me like a blade. "I'll send for you the second I can—""Liar." She wrenched free. "You always say that. You just don't want me there because I'm a burden, same as everyone else thinks. You took our parents from me and now you're leaving too. I hate you, Ivy. I wish it had been you that night instead of them."She was gone before I could answer her, door slamming hard enough to rattle the frame, and I sat on the floor of her empty room until there was nothing left in me to cry with. Six hours later she still hadn't come home. I didn't have six more to spare. I wrote her a letter instead — folded twice, tucked under her pillow where the council wouldn't think to look — and told her the only true thing I had left: that I loved her no matter what she believed of me, and that I'd spend whatever was left of my life making sure hers got better.

***

I went to Callum's rooms last, meaning to ask if his father had told him yet — if he knew he'd just been promised a crown and a wife in the same breath, on a mission that might get me killed before either one meant anything. My hand was an inch from the door when I heard her."Oh, goddess — Callum, faster—"The bed frame was already keeping rhythm with her voice. I stood there with my hand still raised, and the strangest thing wasn't the hurt. It was how little of it there was.I thought, distantly, of that morning — his mouth against my throat, his weight, the twenty-three hours I still had before it would be too late to matter. I'd need the tea before I left. Thank the goddess for small mercies; I couldn't imagine bringing a child of Callum's into a world I might not survive to raise it in.As for the crown — Marrow could keep it. I was leaving to bury a bloodline, not to plan a wedding.