Claimed By Alpha Damian

Chapter Four

Ivy POV

"What do you mean?" I asked. My voice came out barely above a whisper.

Damian stepped fully into the room and shut the door behind him. The small space suddenly felt too small, too warm, with him standing so close I could feel the low thrum of his energy against my skin like a second heartbeat. Outside, I could still hear faint voices in the courtyard, Rhea barking orders at the warriors to stand down now that the Blackthorn wolves had gone. But in this room, it felt like the rest of the world had gone quiet, narrowed down to just the two of us and whatever he was about to tell me.

"Sit down," he said, not unkindly. "You're shaking."

I hadn't noticed I was shaking. I sat on the edge of a wooden bench, and he crouched in front of me again, the same way he had beside his bed, close enough that I had to fight the pull my wolf felt toward him.

"There's an old bloodline," he said slowly, "from before the packs split into territories. Wolves born with silver in their blood instead of gold. We call them Duskborn wolves. Most people think the line died out three generations ago."

"What does that have to do with me?"

"Duskborn wolves don't shift the way ordinary wolves do," he said. "They can't force it early, no matter how hard the Elders push. The shift comes late, and when it comes, it comes violent and strong, strong enough to rival an Alpha's. Your pack's healers didn't call you broken because you were weak, Ivy. They called you broken because they were terrified of what you'd become."

I stared at him. "That's insane. My mother never said anything like that."

"Did your mother come from Blackthorn originally?"

The question hit like a slap. "No," I said slowly. "She came from somewhere in the east. My father never talked about where. She died when I was seven, and after that it was like the whole pack agreed never to speak of her again, like she had been erased on purpose."

"She wasn't erased by accident, Ivy. If she carried the Duskborn line and married into Blackthorn to hide it, your father might have known exactly what he brought into his house. He might have spent your whole childhood terrified of the day it woke up in you."

I thought of every time my father had flinched at loud noises I made as a child, every time he had sent me to the healers for tests no other pup ever had to endure. I had always assumed it was because something was wrong with me. It had never once occurred to me that he might have been watching, waiting, afraid of what I could become instead of what I already was.

"Duskborn wolves have been hunted for generations," Damian said. "Any pack that finds one usually kills them quietly, or marries them off and controls them, or " his jaw tightened, " casts them out and lets the wild lands do the killing for them, so no one can say they broke the old laws against harming their own blood."

"Why would anyone be afraid of a bloodline that only shows up once every few generations?"

"Because a fully shifted Duskborn wolf doesn't answer to pack law the way the rest of us do," he said. "The old stories say they could level a war camp alone if pushed far enough. Whether or not that's true, fear doesn't need proof. It only needs a reason, and your bloodline has always been reason enough for frightened men to act cruelly."

The room tilted around me. Every cruel word from the healers, every disgusted look from my father, every whispered insult in the ceremony circle none of it had been about me being weak. It had been about them being afraid.

"You think I'm one of them," I said. "A Duskborn wolf."

"I know you are." Damian reached out slowly, giving me time to pull away, and pressed two fingers gently against the inside of my wrist. "Your pulse right now. Feel it."

I felt it a strange double beat under my skin, fast and then slow, unlike anything I'd noticed before.

"That's the shift trying to wake up," he said. "It's been asleep your whole life because no one ever triggered it. Fear can't wake a Duskborn wolf. Only a true mate bond can."

My breath caught. "You said you don't do second chances."

Something flickered across his face, pain wrapped around old anger. "I don't. I had a mate once, a long time ago. She chose someone else too, right in front of my whole pack, back before I built this territory. I swore I'd never let the bond make a fool of me again."

"Then why are you helping me?"

"Because Victor Blackthorn faked a death and sent armed wolves across my border in the same night," he said. "This isn't about you being an inconvenient omega anymore, if it ever was. He wants you back, Ivy, or he wants you silenced. And I don't hand my mate over to a man who fakes murders to cover his tracks. Second chance or not."

The word mate sat between us, heavy and undeniable now.

I searched his face for a long moment, looking for some sign that any of this was a trick, a story built to control me the way Blackthorn had always tried to control me. I found none of it. Only a tired kind of honesty, like the truth cost him something to say out loud.

"I don't know how to be what you're describing," I admitted quietly. "I don't even know how to fully shift."

"You will," he said. "Sooner than either of us is ready for, I think." His hand had not let go of mine, and neither of us moved to change that.

A horn sounded somewhere outside, low and urgent, three long blasts that made Damian's whole body go rigid.

"That's the perimeter alarm," he said, rising fast, pulling me up with him by instinct before he seemed to realize what he'd done. His fingers stayed wrapped around mine a beat longer than necessary. "Something crossed the border line again."

Rhea burst through the door a second later, breathless. "Alpha. It's not Blackthorn wolves this time." Her eyes flicked to me, then back to Damian, grim. "It's Victor himself. He's standing at the Hollow Line asking for you by name, and he says he knows exactly who you're hiding."