The Alpha's Forbidden Pact

CHAPTER 2: THE COUNTDOWN

"Be seated," Damaris said, the moment we walked into the gathering hall. "All of you."

"I would rather stand."

"Ivy."

"I am not sitting through this like a child waiting to be told what has already been decided about my own life."

Damaris was the Alpha who had sheltered me since the night my parents were murdered, Theo's father, and the closest thing to unquestioned authority the five of us had ever known. The hall was full, every member of the Five already gathered along the walls, and every head turned toward me at once. A ripple went through the other three, low murmurs, none of them brave enough to speak aloud. Kade didn't sit either. He stood a step behind my shoulder, close enough that I felt him there without turning to look.

Damaris did not argue with me. He simply inclined his head, as though he had expected exactly that answer.

"Very well," he said. "Then I will say it standing as well."

"Say what, exactly."

"The Council confirmed it an hour ago. The Reclaiming Moon has been moved forward. Three weeks from tonight."

The number landed harder the second time, as though it required two strikes to fully sink in.

"Three weeks," I repeated. "To do what, exactly. Someone tell me what that word actually means, because I have spent my whole life hearing it and never once being told what happens after."

"It means your identity ceases to be a secret," Damaris said. "Every pack. Every seat on the Council. Every enemy who has spent eighteen years wondering whether you were even alive. All of them learn who you are, the same night."

"And the mating."

His jaw set. "The Council requires the heir's mate status to be settled the same night her identity is revealed. That is the law that has governed every heir before you. It has always been the law."

"Settled by whom."

"By them, if you do not settle it yourself first."

"Meaning Edmund Thorne."

"Meaning Edmund Thorne. The son of a Council seat, promised to you since before you could walk, in an arrangement meant to bind our world's oldest hidden bloodline to the Council's protection."

"What do you actually know of him," I asked. "Beyond his name and his father's seat."

"He is disciplined. Correct in his manners. His pack has never broken faith with the Council in three generations."

"That is a resume, not a person."

"It is what I have."

"I have never seen his face," I said. "I do not know his voice, his temper, whether he is cruel or simply cold. I know his name, and I know his father sits on the Council, and apparently that is meant to be sufficient reason to spend the rest of my life beside him."

"It is not about sufficiency," Damaris said. "It is about survival. His bloodline stands with the Council. Yours does not, not yet. The mating buys you protection you do not currently possess."

"Protection I never asked for."

"Very little protection is ever asked for. That is precisely what makes it protected."

"My mother did not ask for hers either," I said, and the room went very still around that sentence, as though I had said something I was not meant to know how to say. "And look how well that served her."

Damaris flinched. Small, barely visible, but I saw it, and for a moment I nearly regretted saying it at all.

"That is not the same," he said, quietly.

"Is it not?"

One of the others near the wall, a broad shouldered man I only half recognized, made a low sound of contempt. "That is not law. That is a leash with paperwork attached."

"Mind yourself," Damaris said, without turning.

"I will say it again if you require it."

"Enough," Kade said, and the man fell silent, jaw still tight. Beside him, another of the Five, younger, quieter, kept his eyes on the floor as though he could not stand to watch this part.

I barely registered any of them. My own pulse was too loud in my ears.

"So in three weeks," I said, "I am introduced to the entire wolf world as someone they have hunted for eighteen years, and in the same breath I am handed to a man I have never chosen, by a Council that has never once asked me a single thing about my own life."

"That is the law as it stands."

"That is not a law. That is a sentence."

"Ivy."

"Do not say my name like that is meant to fix it."

"Why now," Kade said. "Three weeks. Why move it forward at all? The date has been held for eighteen years, and suddenly it shifts overnight. That is not the Council being efficient. That is the Council reacting to something."

Damaris hesitated, and the hesitation said more than his answer did. "I do not yet know."

"You always know."

"Not this time."

"Then find out," Kade said, sharper than I had heard him speak to Damaris in years. "Because if the Council is moving on information we do not have, that is not a matter of paperwork. That is a threat to her, and we are standing here discussing mating law instead of asking what actually frightened them."

"You believe I have not considered that."

"I believe you are standing there delivering a briefing instead of an answer."

"Watch yourself," Damaris said, low.

"Or what."

"Kade." My voice cut through before either of them could push further, and both of them looked at me at once, as though they had forgotten I was standing there the entire time. "Enough. Both of you."

Damaris's eyes cut back to Kade, something unreadable moving across his face before he answered. "I intend to find out. Tonight."

Kade's hand found the small of my back for half a second, barely there, gone before it meant anything, but I felt the warning in it. Something was wrong beyond the date itself, and he knew it too.

"There must be another option," Kade said. "Something the Council has not yet buried."

"If one exists, I have not found it in eighteen years of searching," Damaris said, and something in his voice caught, just slightly, on the last word. It did not sound like a report delivered to his heir.

I looked at him properly then, truly looked, and for a moment the composure slipped from his face entirely. His eyes found mine and stayed there, longer than a briefing required, longer than a guardian looks at the girl he is meant to be protecting. Not a glance. Something he had not been fast enough to hide, and my own chest answered it before my mind could tell it not to, a warmth with no business existing, not from him, not tonight, not with an entire room watching. My hands had gone cold at my sides, my breath catching somewhere between my ribs like it had forgotten the way out.

"What," I said quietly, only to him now, as though the rest of the room had gone somewhere else. "What are you not telling me?"

"Nothing you require tonight."

"That is not an answer. That is a delay."

"It is the only one I have at present."

Theo, silent until then, shifted at the back of the room, and I caught it from the corner of my eye, the exact instant he noticed how long his father's gaze had held on me. His eyes moved from Damaris to me and back, sharp, startled, as though he had walked in on something he was not meant to see.

Then his eyes cut to Kade.

Something passed between them, fast and wordless, the kind of look that carried more than either of them would ever say aloud in this room.

"Three weeks," Damaris said again, dragging his voice back into something official, something safer, tearing his gaze from mine as though it cost him. "That is what we have. I will not waste a single day of it."

"Doing what," I said.

"Keeping you alive long enough to choose your own ending instead of theirs."

It should have sounded like comfort. It did not. It sounded like a man promising something he was not certain he could deliver, and beneath that, something else entirely, something buried under eighteen years of duty that he had not managed to bury deep enough tonight.

Theo was still watching his father as though he had never seen him before.

"Dad," he said slowly. "What was that?"

Damaris did not answer. He turned and walked from the hall without another word, and the silence he left behind was louder than anything he could have said.