Claimed By Alpha Damian

Ivy POV The moon was full the night my mate chose someone else in front of the whole pack. I had spent three days getting ready for this ceremony. The healers braided silver thread through my hair. My aunt sewed the white dress by hand, whispering the whole time about how lucky I was that Caleb, the future Alpha, had picked me out of every girl in Blackthorn Pack. I let myself believe it. I let myself believe that maybe, finally, I would stop being the girl who could not shift, the girl the Elders whispered about behind cupped hands. Maybe being chosen by Caleb would fix that. I stood in the center of the ceremony circle in my white dress, my hands shaking, while Caleb would not look at me. Every wolf in Blackthorn Pack was watching. The drums had already started. My father stood behind me with his hand heavy on my shoulder, like he could hold me together by force. The clearing smelled like woodsmoke and crushed pine. Torches lined the circle, throwing long shadows across every familiar face I had known my whole life. I searched the crowd for one kind expression and found none. Even the children had gone quiet, sensing something was wrong before I did. "Caleb," I whispered. "Say something." He finally turned to me. His eyes were not sorry. They were relieved. "I can't marry you, Ivy." His voice carried over the whole circle. "The Elders found my true mate. It's Selene." Selene stepped out from the crowd, chin high, already smiling like she had won a prize. She had been my friend since we were pups. She did not even flinch when she took my place beside him. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. My wolf whined low in my chest, confused and ashamed. Around me, the pack began to murmur, and the murmurs turned into something colder. "She was never right for him," someone said. "Look at her. She can't even shift properly. No wonder the moon rejected her too." That last part hit harder than Caleb's words. It was true. I was twenty-two years old and I had never fully shifted, not once, not even under a blood moon. The healers called me broken. My own father called me an embarrassment when he thought I could not hear. Alpha Victor Blackthorn, Caleb's father, climbed onto the stone platform above us. He did not even bother to lower his voice. "An omega who cannot shift brings weakness into a bloodline," he said. "I will not let my son's future be poisoned by her. Ivy Sorrel is no longer welcome in Blackthorn territory." The whole clearing went silent. Even the wind seemed to stop. "You can't banish me," I said, and my voice cracked in the middle. "This is my home. My mother is buried here." "Your mother was an outsider too," Victor said, like that explained everything. "Take her to the border. Now." Somewhere in the crowd, a woman gasped. Another muttered a prayer to the moon, the kind people said when they thought misfortune might be contagious. I understood then that no one was going to speak for me. Eight years of living in this pack, of tending the sick with the healers, of minding pups who were not my own so their mothers could rest, and not one voice rose to ask Victor to reconsider. I had always been tolerated here, never truly kept. Two guards grabbed my arms before I could run. I looked at my father, begging him with my eyes to stop this, to say one single word in my defense. He looked away. Caleb did not look away. He watched them drag me through the crowd, and for one second I thought I saw something c***k in his face. Then Selene laced her fingers through his, and he turned back to her like I had already stopped existing. They walked me two miles through the dark forest, past the old oak that marked the edge of safe land, all the way to the flat gray stone that marked the Hollow Line the border between Blackthorn territory and the wild lands nobody claimed. Nobody survived long out there alone. Rogue wolves. Starvation.Worse things that did not have names. "Don't come back," the taller guard said. He did not sound cruel. He sounded tired, like he had done this before to someone else. "Whatever's out there is better than what waits for you if you cross that line again." Then they let go of my arms and walked away, and I was alone in the dark with nothing but the dress on my back and the sound of my own heartbeat. I do not know how long I walked. My feet bled through my thin shoes. Branches tore my sleeves. At some point I stopped crying because there was nothing left inside me to cry with. I kept thinking about Caleb's face right before Selene took his hand that one flicker of something that might have been guilt, or might have been nothing at all. I hated myself for still wanting to know which one it was. I thought about turning back more than once. I told myself I could sneak to my mother's grave one last time, kneel there in the dark, and ask her what I was supposed to do now that the only home I had ever known had thrown me away. But the guards' words kept ringing in my ears. Whatever waited past the border stone, they had made it clear that Blackthorn territory would not take me back either way. So I kept walking forward instead, one bleeding foot after the other, until the trees around me stopped looking familiar at all. The wild lands smelled different than home. Sharper. Colder. Every shadow looked like teeth. Somewhere past midnight, I heard a howl that was not like any howl I had ever heard. It was deep and slow, and it rattled straight through my bones, and every animal in the forest went dead silent right after it, like even the owls were afraid to breathe. I froze against a tree, my heart slamming. The howl came again, closer. I turned to run and my foot caught a root. I went down hard, my head cracking against a stone, and the last thing I remember is the ground tilting sideways and a pair of eyes glowing silver in the dark, watching me from between the trees. A voice, low and rough, said something I could not make out, and I felt myself lifted off the cold ground before the world tipped fully into darkness. Then everything went black.