LOGINKnox drives past the apartment and past every familiar turn until the roads get narrow and the streetlights thin out and we’re climbing a hill that I’ve been on once before.He parks the bike at the top and kills the engine, and the silence that replaces the motor is the specific silence of altitude. The skyline spreads out beneath the ledge in a grid of lights that looks like something a person designed to feel permanent, but the permanence is now a lie because the tribunal that ended two hours ago has the authority to erase every memory I’ve built since the engagement dinner, and the city below me would still be there and I wouldn’t know why I was looking at it.Knox sits on the concrete ledge with his legs hanging over the edge and his hands gripping the lip and his body is doing the thing it does when the wolf is pressing close enough to the surface that the human shape starts to blur. His shoulders are broader than they were at dinner, with his hands gripping the concrete with a
Knox’s hand tightens on my neck and the bond floods with something that feels like a growl being suppressed through the connection. I put my hand on his thigh under the table because the last thing we need right now is Knox shifting in a tribunal chamber and proving Viktor’s point about humans destabilising pack wolves.The elders deliberate. I can’t hear them – they’ve moved to the far end of the room and the conversation is conducted in voices low enough that even Knox’s wolf ears are straining – and the waiting is its own form of torture, because the people discussing whether to erase me are standing twenty feet away. They're just standing there making a decision that will determine whether I wake up tomorrow knowing that Knox Voss exists or wondering why there’s a silver scar on my neck that I can’t explain.Viktor raises his hand, and the deliberation stops.“The tribunal is split,” he says, and his voice carries the authority of a man who expected the split and engineered it. “I
IVY’S POVThe days between the pack meeting and the tribunal are the longest of my life, and I measure them in the many different ways Knox’s body changes as the countdown progresses. His sleep gets shorter, his grip tighter, his wolf pressing closer to the surface until the gold in his eyes stops flickering and starts STAYING, a permanent amber ring around the grey that he can’t retract even when my mom asks him at breakfast if he’s feeling okay because his eyes look “different.”He isn’t getting enough sleep.He’s getting approximately ninety minutes a night, and I can always feel him awake through the bond because it sends a low constant hum of alertness that pulses against my spine in the cage-grip while I lie there pretending to sleep.My mom makes him soup – the same chicken noodle she made me when I was twelve and had the flu – standing at the stove with her wooden spoon and her concerned face and her belief that warm broth can fix anything.She sets the bowl in front of the ma
KNOX’S POVEvery wolf in the Black Fang compound is staring at Ivy, and every wolf in the Black Fang compound is going to lose their eyes if they don’t stop.I’m noting all the stares by proximity and intensity, and I see the specific angle of their attention on the mark on her neck that glows faintly under the bar lighting like a neon sign that reads TAKEN in a language older than speech.The prospect at the door looked too long. The enforcer by the pool table looked longer. The she-wolf at the bar – one of Mara’s friends, the one with the jaw scar and the attitude problem – looked at Ivy’s throat and then at me and then back at Ivy’s throat with an expression that I filed under “deal with later,” because I can only dismantle one threat at a time, and the threat sitting at the head of the long table in the back room is the one that requires my full attention.Viktor Voss looks like what he is – the assumed Alpha of a bloodline that includes my father and myself.He is a man in his la
“You lied to me,” I say, and my hips slam down hard enough that his head tips back against the couch. “You said you didn’t touch him.”“I didn’t hit him–”“You grabbed his FACE.” Another slam. His jaw clenches and his hips buck upward meeting my downstroke and the collision sends a spike through my pelvis that makes my teeth clench. “You left a bruise on my best friend’s cheekbone and LIED about it.”“He kissed you–”“And I pushed him away.” I release one of his wrists and my hand fists in his hair and PULLS – hard enough that his neck stretches and his throat is exposed. “I pushed him away and brushed my teeth and washed my face for you, and you STILL came home and fucked me through the mattress like I was the one who needed punishing.”His freed hand grabs my hip and tries to take control of the pace, but I slap it away sharply.The slap makes his eyes go FULL gold and his grin widens into something feral and delighted because the aggression is doing to him what his aggression does
He doesn’t ask why. The motorcycle simply starts in the background and the call ends.I drive back to the apartment with the window down because I need cold air on my face to keep the tears from starting, because if the tears start now they won’t stop until they’ve washed away every lie I’ve been maintaining since the engagement dinner.He’s in the driveway when I pull up. Helmet off. Leaning against the bike with his arms crossed and his eyes already scanning me.I walk to him and my hand closes around his belt buckle – the piece of metal that started everything on that first night.His eyebrows rise. The gold flickers at the edges of his grey eyes and his mouth opens to say something, but I don’t let him say it.I pull the buckle and he follows the momentum forward, so I push him through the front door and down the hallway and onto the couch – my mom’s couch, the couch that has absorbed more of my sins than any piece of furniture in this apartment – and Knox drops onto the cushions
“Your breathing just changed,” he says, and his finger hovers over my clit close enough that I can feel the heat radiating from his skin. “The pattern shift tells me the pressure is approaching the threshold where your body begins involuntary contractions – the exact flutter I can usually feel agai
His voice is quiet enough that I have to hold my breath to hear it.“I tried to stop wanting you the way I’ve stopped everything else my wolf has wanted for two decades. I can suppress the shift. I can suppress the hearing and the scent and the eyes. But I cannot suppress YOU. My soul won’t let you
The bruises on my collarbone are Dominic’s.I know this because Knox’s fingerprints live on my hips and my thighs and the backs of my arms, but the marks sitting in the hollow above my chest are from a hand that gripped the front of my throat on the couch while his fingers were inside me.I don’t r
IVY’S POVI make it to the upstairs bathroom in nine seconds because Dominic said “back hallway, now” in the same voice he uses to dismiss a student whose thesis has failed, and the efficiency of his crisis management would be impressive if I wasn’t the crisis being managed – barefoot on the hardwo







