Rejected by My Alpha Mate: My Alpha's Regret

Three Years Later

Blood soaked through the gauze faster than Ivy could replace it.

"Hold still," she snapped, pressing her palm flat against the gash running down the man's forearm. He was twice her size, a construction worker who'd caught his arm on rebar three blocks from the clinic, and he was doing exactly the opposite of holding still.

"It's not that deep," he gritted out, which was a lie, because Ivy could see bone.

"It's exactly that deep." She reached for the suture kit without looking, muscle memory guiding her hand after three years of doing this more nights than not. "You're lucky the ER's a forty-minute wait tonight. Lucky for you, I'm not particular about paperwork."

That got a strained laugh out of him, which she took as a good sign. Pain tolerance and humor usually arrived together.

What she didn't tell him, what she never told anyone, was that the reason his bleeding had already slowed to something manageable wasn't luck. It was her hand. It had been happening for over a year now, small and quiet at first, barely noticeable: wounds closing faster under her palms than they should, fevers breaking sooner, pain dulling like something in her simply refused to let a person hurt in front of her without doing something about it.

She still didn't have a name for it. Omegas weren't supposed to have gifts like this. Omegas weren't supposed to have much of anything, according to every pack she'd ever known.

She'd stopped waiting for an explanation. She stitched instead.

Three years had reshaped her into someone Blackwood wouldn't recognize, and that was exactly the point. Gone was the girl who used to make herself smaller in rooms full of higher-ranked wolves. In her place: a woman who ran a half-legal clinic out of the back of a pharmacy in a city three hundred miles from any pack territory, who didn't flinch when men twice her size bled all over her exam table, who had built, plank by plank, a version of herself that didn't need anyone's permission to exist.

She finished the last stitch, taped it down, and started peeling off her gloves. "Come back in five days. Sooner if it gets hot or starts weeping."

"You're better than half the doctors I've seen." He fished out cash, more than she'd asked for, and she didn't argue. Rent didn't pay itself. "You ever think about actually getting licensed for this?"

"Every single day." She didn't elaborate. Licensing meant paperwork, background checks, a paper trail; things a wolf who'd crossed a pack boundary without an Alpha's blessing couldn't afford to leave behind. Unclaimed and unprotected, the law called her. It also meant untraceable, if she was careful, and she'd gotten very careful.

The bell over the front door rang as he left. Ivy scrubbed the blood off the table, tossed the gauze, and allowed herself thirty seconds to press a hand flat against her own sternum, the way she still did some nights without meaning to.

The ache wasn't gone. Three years hadn't managed that. It had just gone quiet enough to ignore most days, a low hum under her ribs instead of a scream. She'd told herself it would fade eventually. She was starting to suspect it never would, that some bonds didn't unravel so much as scar over, and you learned to live around the scar tissue instead.

She didn't let herself think his name. She'd gotten good at that too.

The knock on the clinic's back door came twenty minutes after closing, three sharp raps in a rhythm no human bothered to use.

Ivy went still behind the counter, every instinct she'd spent three years half-forgetting suddenly wide awake. She knew that knock. Pack knock — the kind meant to be heard by a wolf's ears and ignored by everyone else's.

She thought about not answering. She thought about it for exactly as long as it took her feet to carry her to the door anyway.

The man standing in the alley was older, gray threading through dark hair, dressed like he'd tried and failed to look human: a coat too formal for the neighborhood, shoes too clean. She recognized him before he spoke. Elias, one of Blackwood's senior betas, a man who used to bring her mother medicine when Dana caught the flu too hard to hunt for herself.

"Ivy Sorensen." He said her name like a confirmation, like he'd half-expected not to find her at all. "You've gotten harder to track."

"That was the idea." She kept the door only half-open, her body angled to block the view inside. "What do you want, Elias?"

"Not what I want." He glanced past her once, quick and assessing, before his eyes came back to her face. "The pack needs you. There's been an... incident. Something the healers can't fix, and your name came up."

Ivy's laugh came out sharper than she meant it to. "My name came up. After three years of nobody in Blackwood so much as sending word to see if I was alive."

"I know how that sounds."

"You have no idea how that sounds." She crossed her arms, chest tight in a way that had nothing to do with the gift she still didn't understand. "I don't owe that pack anything. I especially don't owe—"

She stopped herself. Elias's expression didn't change, but something in his stillness told her he'd heard the name she hadn't said anyway.

"He didn't send me," Elias said quietly. "Marcus did, technically. But it's Kai who needs the help most, if I'm being honest with you. Territory's been unstable since his father passed control fully to him last year. Rival packs are testing the borders. Something's gone wrong with the bond-marked wounds his warriors keep taking, wounds that won't heal the way they should." He paused. "Wounds like the kind you seem to have a talent for closing, according to what I've heard about a clinic three hundred miles out that doesn't ask questions."

Ivy's stomach dropped. Word had reached Blackwood after all. Of course it had. Nothing stayed hidden from a pack that wanted to find it badly enough.

"I'm not coming back for him," she said, and hated how much she needed to say it out loud, like convincing herself mattered more than convincing Elias.

"Nobody's asking you to come back for him." Elias held her gaze, steady. "I'm asking you to come back for the wolves who'll die without you. What you do with Kai Sterling once you're standing in front of him again is your business."

Behind her ribs, the old ache flared, sudden and vicious, as if it had been listening for its own name.

Ivy looked past Elias at the dark mouth of the alley, at the life she'd built stitch by stitch on the other side of that door, and felt the first c***k form in three years of careful distance.

"Give me a day," she said finally. "I need to close things here."

Elias nodded once, satisfied, and didn't smile, because he was smart enough to know better.

"One day," he agreed. "Don't make Blackwood come find you a second time, Ivy. It won't be this gentle."

He was gone before she could ask what that meant.