Claimed By Alpha Damian

Chapter Two

Ivy POV

I woke up warm.

That was the first strange thing, because I had gone to sleep freezing on a forest floor, and now I was wrapped in something soft that smelled like cedar and smoke. My head throbbed where I had hit the stone. I opened my eyes slowly, afraid of what I would see.

For a moment I lay still, listening. A fire crackled somewhere close. Wind pushed against thick walls instead of open sky. My whole body ached, but the sharp, screaming pain from the fall was gone, replaced by a dull soreness like I had slept a very long time. I flexed my fingers under the furs, half convinced I had died out there in the wild lands and this was simply what death felt like.

I was in a room built from dark wood and stone, lit by a low fire. Furs covered a huge bed I was lying on. My torn dress was gone, replaced by a soft gray shirt that was far too big for me. Panic hit me first, then confusion, then a strange pull in my chest that made no sense at all.

"You're awake."

The voice came from the corner of the room, low and rough, like gravel under boots. I sat up too fast and the room spun.

He stepped into the firelight, and I forgot how to breathe.

He was tall, built like something out of a war story, with dark hair and a jaw sharp enough to cut glass. But it was his eyes that stopped me cold silver, bright, almost glowing, the exact color of the eyes I had seen right before I blacked out.

"You," I whispered. "You were the howl."

"I was hunting a rogue near the Hollow Line," he said. "Found you bleeding on the ground instead."

My wolf, the one that never fully woke up, the one the healers said was broken, suddenly slammed against my ribs so hard I gasped out loud. It was not fear. It was recognition. It was screaming one word over and over in a language older than either of us.

Mate.

I pressed a hand flat against my chest like I could hold the feeling in, or push it back down where it had slept my whole life. Nothing like this had ever happened with Caleb. Not once, not even at the height of our courtship, had my wolf so much as stirred for him. I had assumed that was simply how I was built quiet, dormant, wrong. But this stranger had barely spoken three sentences to me, and every instinct I owned was already leaning toward him like a plant toward light.

"No," I said out loud, before I could stop myself. "No, that's not possible."

His eyes narrowed, and I watched something shift behind them shock, then disbelief, then a hunger he tried to bury fast. "You feel it too."

"I can't have a mate. I can't even fully shift." The words tumbled out before I could stop them, humiliating and true. "The Elders in my pack said the moon rejected me."

Something dark crossed his face. "Which pack cast you out?"

"Blackthorn," I said, and my voice shook on the name.

His jaw tightened until a muscle jumped in his cheek. "Victor Blackthorn's territory."

"You know him?"

"I know of him." He said it like a threat, not an answer, and something dark and old passed behind his silver eyes, gone again before I could name it. "He's been sending scouts across the Hollow Line for months. Testing my borders." He crossed the room in three long strides and crouched in front of me, close enough that I could feel heat rolling off his skin. "What's your name?"

"Ivy." My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "Ivy Sorrel."

"Damian Ashe." He watched my face carefully when he said it, like the name should mean something to me.

It did. Every wolf in the northern territories knew the name Damian Ashe. The Border Alpha. The man who ruled the border lands alone, who had buried three different packs that tried to take his territory, who was rumored to be part something older than wolf, something the old stories did not have a kind word for. Mothers used his name to quiet fussy pups. Elders spoke it in warnings about wandering too close to the Hollow Line. I had heard those stories my whole life the way you hear stories about ghosts frightening, but always about someone else, never about you.

I was sitting in his bed, wearing his shirt, and my wolf was howling at him like he had hung the moon himself.

"You're the Border Alpha," I said.

My mind raced back through every rumor I had ever heard about him, trying to line them up against the man standing in front of me. None of them matched. The stories painted a monster, something to fear from a distance. They had not mentioned the way his eyes had softened, just slightly, when he first told me his name.

"And you," he said quietly, "are apparently my mate. Which is a problem, Ivy Sorrel, because I do not do second chances. Not for anyone. Not even the moon."

The way he said it made my chest ache in a way I did not understand. Like he was warning me and warning himself at the same time.

Before I could ask what he meant, a fist pounded on the door hard enough to shake the frame.

"Alpha!" a voice shouted from outside. "Scouts spotted Blackthorn wolves crossing the Hollow Line. Six of them. Heading this way, and Alpha they're carrying a body."

Damian went very still. His silver eyes locked onto mine, and for the first time since I woke up, I saw something that looked almost like fear cross his face.

"Describe the body," he called out, not looking away from me.

There was a pause, and then the guard's voice came again, quieter this time.

"Looks like a girl, sir. White dress. They're saying she ran from her own banishment and died in the wild lands last night."

The blood drained out of my face.

They thought I was dead. And whatever Victor Blackthorn was doing with a body dressed like me, six wolves deep into another Alpha's land, it was not to bring me home.

Damian rose to his full height, and the air in the room changed, thickened, dropped ten degrees colder. "Stay behind me," he said. "Whatever they came here to finish, they are not finishing it tonight."