Dumped the Alpha, Mated to the Lycan

Ivy POV

The rogues came out of the tree line all at once, six of them, maybe eight. I lost count when the first one hit me from the side and put me on the ground.

"Julian!"

I rolled, got a knee under me, and a second one closed its jaw around my forearm. Pain shot up to my shoulder. I drove my other fist into its eye until it let go and staggered back, snarling.

"Julian, here!"

He was thirty feet away, sword already out. He turned toward my voice, and for half a second I let myself believe he was coming.

He ran past me.

Selena was pinned against a boulder, one rogue snapping at her ankle. Julian tore it off her and threw it into the rocks. He pulled her up by both arms, checked her face, her hands, her throat, one part of her body at a time, like she was made of something precious.

He didn't look back at me once.

A third rogue came in low and I had nothing left to throw at it but myself. Sylvie didn't surge. She hadn't surged in years, not since the night that took her from me. I grabbed a fallen branch and swung it into the nearest skull. Teeth found my arm again, lower this time, and I felt the skin give before I felt the pain.

"Someone help her!" That was a warrior's voice, not Julian's.

I don't know how long it took for the rest of them to arrive. Long enough that my legs stopped holding me on their own, long enough that the world narrowed down to the next swing, the next bite, the next breath. By the time the horns finally sounded and the rogues scattered into the dark, I was on my knees in a pool that I was fairly sure was mine.

A healer got an arm under me and pressed cloth hard against the bite on my shoulder. "Easy. You've lost a lot. Don't try to stand yet."

I let my eyes close for one second. Just one.

"Ivy."

Julian's voice. I opened my eyes and for half a heartbeat let myself hope it meant something.

It didn't. He crouched in front of me and pulled his collar down, showing me the gray creeping along his collarbone, thin lines spreading toward his throat. "It's been three days. I need it now, not after the healers finish playing with bandages."

"I'm bleeding from four places, Julian."

"And I'm in pain." He held out his hand, palm up, and waited the way he always waited, like the answer had never once been in question.

The healer's hands stilled on my shoulder. He didn't say anything. Nobody said anything to an Alpha, not even about his half-dead wife.

"Julian, she needs to rest first," he tried, quiet, careful.

"She'll rest after." Julian didn't even look at him.

I gave Julian my arm.

The healer drew it himself, quick and clinical, filling a small glass vial from the vein at my wrist. Julian didn't wait for a thank-you to occur to him. He took the vial and drank it down in one motion. The gray along his collarbone faded as I watched, color easing back into his face while mine drained out of mine. I had become a thing he kept in working order rather than a person he was married to.

When he finished, he set the empty vial down without a glance and stood. He didn't look at the bandage darkening on my shoulder. He didn't ask if I could walk.

"Get some rest," he said, not looking back. "You look terrible."

That was the closest he came all night to checking on me.

I remembered the first time, six years ago, in a healer's tent that smelled like burnt sage. I'd thrown myself between Julian and a rogue with its jaws already open for his throat, and the bite that should have killed him went into my shoulder instead. I was sixteen.

The healer who closed the wound looked at my mother with the grim face people use right before they ruin your life.

"It's not just her shoulder," he said. "Something's lodged in the boy. Venom this deep doesn't clear on its own, not with herbs, not with time. It takes blood with the old strength still in it. Lancaster blood. Hers specifically, and no one else's will do."

"For how long?" my mother asked.

"For as long as he lives."

Sylvie went quiet inside me that same night, somewhere past the screaming, and she never fully woke up again. No shift since. No howl since. Just a small, dim presence curled at the bottom of me, breathing when I breathed.

My mother's hand found mine and gripped hard enough to hurt. "Do you understand what that means for the rest of your life, Ivy? Every time he needs it. However often that is."

"I understand."

"He won't always remember to ask kindly." She said it like a warning, like she already knew.

I looked across the tent at Julian, bandaged, alive, watching me like I'd handed him something he could never give back. He reached for my hand before either of our mothers could stop him.

"Ivy. I'll marry you, and only you. I swear I'll be good to you for the rest of my life."

"I don't care what it means." I meant it. "I'd do it again."

The marriage contract came two years later, the week I turned eighteen. By then my father and brother were already dead on the eastern border, and my mother followed them into the ground before that winter was out. Nobody was left to ask if a sixteen-year-old's promise still held at eighteen, except a kid brother too young to understand what I'd just signed away. I signed it myself, certain that a husband who owed me his life would spend the rest of his cherishing mine.

I was wrong about that for four straight years. Six, if I counted from the bite. I'm twenty-two now, and not once did Julian say the word thank you. Not tonight either.

By the time I made it back to my room, my arm ached down to the bone and my legs barely held me up the stairs. I sat on the edge of the bed and let myself shake for exactly as long as it took to hear footsteps in the hall.

Selena let herself in without knocking. "I heard you got hurt."

"I'm fine."

"Good." She sat down across from me like we were friends, not once looking at the blood soaked through the bandage on my arm. "Julian was so frightened tonight. Did you see his face when he pulled me out? I've never seen him move that fast for anyone."

"I was there, Selena."

"Of course you were." Her smile didn't move. "He talks about it, you know. How close I came tonight. He couldn't sleep after the last time either, so we sat up most of the night just talking."

"What were you talking about, at that hour."

"Things a wife should probably ask her husband, not me." She tilted her head, almost gentle about it. "But you never do ask him much, do you. You just give him what he needs and wait for him to notice you. Six years, and you're still waiting."

I said nothing. There was nothing to say that she didn't already know the shape of.

She set a small cup on the table between us, steam still curling off it. "He asked me to bring you this before I left his rooms. Said you'd need it, after giving so much blood again."

"He asked you."

"Mm." Her smile finally moved, just slightly, the kind that already knew exactly what it was doing. "We talk more than you'd think."

I should have told her to leave. I should have thrown the cup at the wall and watched it shatter against her smug little face. Instead I picked it up, because some small idiot part of me still wanted to believe he'd thought of me at all tonight, and drank it down before she'd even finished smiling.

"Drink it all," she said. "Doctor's orders."

I finished it. She left a few minutes later, humming something under her breath, the door clicking shut behind her.

The pain hit before the sound of her footsteps faded down the hall.

It came low and wrong, a fist closing around everything beneath my ribs, and I doubled over the edge of the bed with a sound I didn't recognize as my own. I pressed a hand to my stomach and felt it again, sharper, twisting.

I looked down. The sheet under me was turning red, fast, faster than any cut should bleed.

"No." I pressed both hands against myself like that could hold anything in. "No. No."

Nobody came running. Nobody ever did.

The pain peaked and folded me clean in half. Through the haze I saw my own hands, red to the wrist, and understood what they were trying to tell me a full second before I let myself believe it.

"Help me!" The scream tore out of me before I could stop it. "Someone, please, help me!"

My baby.