Rejected by My Alpha Mate: My Alpha's Regret

Marking His Territory

The summons came an hour before sunset. A pack dinner, formal enough that Ivy nearly refused it outright, the kind of event where every seat at the table meant something and every absence meant something worse.

"You don't have to go," Dana said over the phone, the first real conversation they'd managed since Ivy's return. "Nobody can force you to sit through one of Marcus's dinners."

"If I don't go, it looks like I'm hiding. If I do go, it looks like I'm staking a claim I haven't agreed to make." Ivy pressed her forehead against the cool window glass of her room, watching the sun drop lower over the training yard. "There's no version of tonight that doesn't get read as a statement."

"Then make the statement you actually mean," Dana said, gentle but firm, the way she'd been since Ivy was small enough to need that particular tone. "You're not the girl who left this pack with nothing. Walk in like you know it."

Ivy dressed with more care than she wanted to admit, something simple and dark that made her feel steadier than pretty, and told herself it had nothing to do with the fact that Renata would be at that table too.

The dining hall was already half full when she arrived, long tables set with more formality than Blackwood usually bothered with, Marcus seated at the head with the particular stillness of a man who'd spent decades learning to look unbothered while calculating everything around him. Renata sat close to his right, poised and glittering in deep green silk, exactly where a future daughter in law would sit.

Ivy's stomach tightened. She found an open seat near the far end of the table, deliberately distant, and had barely settled into it before Kai entered.

The room's attention shifted the second he walked in, the way a pack's attention always bent toward its Alpha, but Ivy watched his eyes go straight past his father, past Renata, and land on her before he'd even fully crossed the threshold.

He didn't sit at the head beside Marcus, where tradition and every unspoken rule of this dinner clearly expected him to. He crossed the entire length of the hall instead, pulled out the empty chair beside Ivy, and sat down like it was the most natural decision in the world.

The silence that followed was loud enough to feel.

"Kai." Marcus's voice carried the particular warning tone Ivy remembered from years ago, low and controlled, meant to correct without ever raising in volume. "There's a seat prepared for you here."

"I can see that." Kai reached for the wine at the center of the table, unbothered, pouring a glass for Ivy before his own. "I prefer this one."

Renata's smile didn't waver, though Ivy caught the tightness at the corners of it. "It's sweet, honoring the healer who's helping our wounded. Though I imagine there are more appropriate ways to show gratitude than rearranging seating at a formal dinner."

"I'm not showing gratitude." Kai's voice stayed level, but something underneath it sharpened, unmistakable. "I'm sitting where I want to sit."

Marcus's jaw flexed once, visibly, before he mastered it. "We have guests tonight, Kai. The Hale delegation traveled a long way to discuss the alliance terms. This isn't the venue for personal statements."

"Then it's fortunate I'm not making one for the venue's benefit." Kai's hand found the back of Ivy's chair, not quite touching her, close enough that she felt the heat of it anyway. "I'm making it because I want every person at this table to understand something clearly before the meal starts. Ivy Sorensen is not a guest healer passing through. Whatever business terms my father wants to discuss regarding this pack's future, that fact does not change."

The hall had gone utterly silent. Ivy felt her pulse hammering hard enough to be embarrassing, half mortified at being the center of every stare in the room and half something she refused to name, something hot and unwilling and entirely too pleased at the possessive edge in his voice.

"Kai." Marcus's tone had dropped low, dangerous. "We will discuss this privately."

"There's nothing to discuss privately that I'm not comfortable saying here." Kai's eyes hadn't left Ivy's face, gold bright and unguarded in a way that made her chest ache. "You raised me to protect this pack above everything, and I have. I'm still willing to. But I won't do it by pretending I don't know exactly what I lost the last time I let you convince me otherwise."

Renata's composure cracked for exactly one visible second before she smoothed it back into place, reaching for her own wine glass with a hand that wasn't quite steady. "How refreshingly honest," she said, voice tight. "Though I wonder if your pack's warriors will feel quite so sentimental when the Hale border support disappears along with the alliance."

"That's my concern to manage. Not Ivy's." Kai's tone didn't rise, but something in it hardened into something closer to a warning growl than words. "I'd advise against testing how far that concern extends where she's involved."

Marcus's eyes cut toward Ivy, cold and assessing in a way that made her skin crawl, though he said nothing further, apparently choosing the retreat of a man deciding this particular battle wasn't worth losing in front of the entire hall.

Dinner resumed in stiff, careful conversation around them, dozens of low voices picking the moment apart in whispers Ivy could hear perfectly well even without a wolf's hearing to help.

She found Kai afterward on the veranda, alone, staring out at the dark tree line with the particular stillness of a man replaying every word he'd just said and bracing for the consequences.

"You didn't have to do that," she said, stopping beside him, close enough to feel the tension still coiled through his shoulders.

"Yes, I did." He didn't look at her, jaw tight. "I spent three years letting my father dictate what I was allowed to want. I'm done doing that in front of a room that already watched him force me into rejecting you once."

"Renata's not going to let that go quietly."

"No," Kai agreed. "She won't. Neither will he." He finally turned to face her, and whatever careful composure he'd held through dinner had cracked entirely, leaving something rawer underneath, something that looked almost like fear. "I need you to know I'm not doing this to win some kind of game with my father. I'm doing it because sitting at that table pretending I don't want you within arm's reach was never going to be possible again. Not after the medical wing. Not after feeling you back under this roof."

Ivy's breath caught. The space between them had narrowed without either of them seeming to notice, close enough now that she could feel the heat radiating off him, could see the low, hungry want he'd stopped bothering to hide.

"This is dangerous," she whispered, though she didn't step back.

"I know." His hand rose, slow, giving her every chance to stop him, and brushed a strand of hair back from her face with a gentleness that felt like it cost him considerable restraint to maintain. "I don't care."

"Kai—"

Whatever she'd meant to say next dissolved the second his forehead dropped to rest against hers, both of them breathing unsteadily in the narrow space left between their mouths, the mate bond pulling taut and insistent under her ribs like it had been waiting three years for exactly this moment.

Neither of them moved to close the last inch. Neither of them moved away either.

"Tell me to stop," he said again, voice wrecked, echoing the same offer he'd made in the medical wing, and Ivy understood with sudden, terrifying clarity that she was quickly running out of reasons to say yes.