Claimed By Alpha Damian

Chapter Three

Ivy POV

I followed Damian out into the main hall of his lodge, my bare feet freezing on the stone floor, my heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat. A dozen warriors were already gathering by the front doors, all of them tall and armed and silent, watching their Alpha for orders.

"Bring the girl to the war room," Damian said. "Nobody touches her. Nobody sees her. Understood?"

A woman with a long braid and a scar over one eyebrow nodded sharply and grabbed my arm, pulling me down a side hallway before I could argue. Her grip was firm but not unkind.

"I'm Rhea, Beta of this pack," she said as we walked. "You picked a wild night to fall out of the sky and land on our Alpha, little omega."

The lodge was bigger than I had realized from the small room I woke up in. Stone hallways branched off in every direction, lined with old weapons and furs and the mounted skulls of animals I did not recognize. Warriors nodded to Rhea as we passed, their eyes sliding curiously to me before flicking away, too disciplined to stare openly at their Alpha's business.

"He doesn't bring strangers here," Rhea added, almost to herself. "Not once in six years have I seen him carry someone through that front door himself."

"I didn't fall out of anything," I muttered. "I got thrown out of my own pack for being broken."

Rhea snorted. "Broken. Sure." She glanced sideways at me, something calculating in her eyes. "You know your scent changed the second you woke up in his room, right? You smell like storm and silver now. You didn't smell like that when the scouts brought you in unconscious."

I didn't understand what she meant, and I didn't have time to ask, because we reached a heavy door and she pushed me through it into a small stone room with a single narrow window. "Stay here. Bar the door if you have to. I mean it."

Then she was gone, and I was alone with my own thundering heart.

I pressed myself against the wall beside the window and looked out at the dark courtyard below. Torches lit the space in flickering orange light. I could see Damian standing at the center of it, arms crossed, utterly still, while six Blackthorn wolves stood across from him at the edge of his territory line. Between them, laid out on the ground, was a body in a torn white dress.

My knees went weak just looking at it. I gripped the stone windowsill hard enough to hurt, trying to keep my breathing quiet, trying not to think about how easily that could have been me if Damian had not found me first. Behind Damian, a row of his warriors stood in silent formation, unmoving, radiating a kind of controlled violence I had never seen in Blackthorn's guards. Nobody here looked like they were bluffing.

My stomach turned over. It was not me. It could not be me. But from a distance, in the dark, with the same dress I had worn to my own ceremony

"Border Alpha," one of the Blackthorn wolves called out, his voice carrying easily through the still night air. I recognized him. Dorian, one of Victor's personal guard. "We regret the trespass onto your land. We came only to recover our dead. This girl ran from a lawful banishment and perished in your territory. We ask only to take her home for burial."

"Convenient," Damian said, "that a girl in a wedding dress died on my land the same night your Alpha cast out an omega for the crime of not fully shifting."

Dorian's jaw tightened. "A tragic coincidence, Alpha Voss."

"Uncover her face."

There was a pause. Dorian did not move.

"Uncover her face," Damian said again, quieter this time, and quiet from him was somehow worse than shouting. "Or I will assume you brought me a lie wrapped in a dead woman's dress, and I will treat the insult accordingly."

One of the other wolves knelt and pulled the cloth back from the body's face. Even from the window I could see it was not me. Similar height, similar hair but a stranger, someone I had never seen in my life.

My hand flew to my mouth. Someone had died. Someone had actually died, dressed to look like me, so that six armed wolves would have a reason to walk straight into Damian's territory and search it top to bottom.

"That is not the omega you cast out," Damian said flatly. "So either you murdered an innocent girl to dress her like your victim, or someone is lying to you, Dorian. Which is it?"

Dorian's composure cracked for just a second. "Alpha Victor gave us his word that"

"Victor Blackthorn does not know the meaning of the word," Damian cut him off. "Take your dead and get off my land. And tell your Alpha that if he sends wolves across my border again for any reason, I will not return the favor of a clean burial."

The Blackthorn wolves gathered the body and retreated into the trees without another word, and I finally let myself breathe.

I did not understand any of it. Why would Victor fake my death and send scouts across the border on the same night? Unless he already knew I had survived. Unless this was never about recovering a body at all.

Unless he was looking for me.

I thought back over the last two days of my life in Blackthorn before the ceremony the way the Elders had watched me a little too closely at meals, the way my father had started locking his study door whenever I walked past. I had told myself it was nothing. Now every small strange moment lined up into something I did not want to look at directly.

I do not know how long I stood there, replaying every word Victor had said, before I heard footsteps approaching down the hall outside. My whole body tensed.

The door behind me opened, and I spun around, expecting Rhea. Instead Damian filled the doorway, his silver eyes finding mine across the small room, something unreadable burning behind them.

"They know you're alive," he said. "And I think I know why they threw you out in the first place, Ivy, and it was never about your shift."

His voice was steady, but there was something new in his eyes when he said it, something that looked almost like fear on my behalf.