Ivy #3
Thane peels his soaked shirt over his head with a grimace and tosses it into the corner of the tent. In the flickering green light, his tan muscle is covered in scars of his own. They're not nearly as extensive as Wraith's, but there are enough to show he's been through his own battles.
Then his nostrils flare. His head turns slowly, and those dark eyes drop straight to my bare leg.
"Ivy," he says quietly. "Who's bleeding?"
"Me. It's… it's fine." I tug my skirt further down, but I know he can smell it. I give up. "Okay. So I moved wrong. I caught myself on his teeth."
True. All of it.
"You… uh… you what?" Thane asks hoarsely, his eyes sliding to Wraith. To his bare face, his slack hands, the dried blood at the corner of his jaw.
He clenches his own jaw, then digs a small first aid kit out of the duffel and holds it out to me, muttering, "Not even gonna ask."
I could kiss him for that.
The bandages and his lack of questions.
"The pull," Thane says finally, grabbing a dry shirt from his duffel while I stick a couple of band-aids on the cuts. They're small, no big deal at all, but Wraith is still staring at them, catatonic, like he believes he maimed me.
"The... pull? Sorry, what?"
He pauses with the shirt halfway on, gesturing vaguely between us, then at Wraith's still form.
"Pack bonds run deep, and not just because he’s my brother.
When one of us is in distress—real distress, not just having a bad day—we feel it.
Like a string tugging at your chest, telling you which direction to go. "
I can feel it, too.
But I wait, listening.
He glances back at me, hesitating again. "You're our scent match," he says. "And we're yours. However those bonds end up looking, whatever form they take… the bonds don't lie."
I look at Wraith, still lost in his dissociative state, my scarf fallen away from his face. Even in the eerie green light of the glowsticks, even with his sharp teeth exposed in that permanent skeletal grin that makes my inner omega whimper, all I see is mine.
"Good," I mumble. "Because I don't think I could leave even if I wanted to anymore."
"That's the thing about pack bonds," Thane says softly, shifting to spread more dry blankets around us. "Once they take root, they're almost impossible to break. They just grow deeper, stronger, until you can't imagine life without feeling that pull toward each other."
Pack bonds.
And love, I think, but I don't say it. Not yet.
Thunder rolls overhead, louder and closer, and I press closer to both alphas, shivering. I'm suddenly cold as fuck.
"Thank you," I murmur as Thane tucks blankets around me. "For finding us."
"Always," he says simply, flashing an exhausted smile. "That's what pack does."
Pack.
I roll the word around in my mouth, tasting it.
"Fuck," Thane mutters, drawing my attention back to him. There's so much pain in that single word, somehow. "He's really gone, isn't he? He's not even trying to cover his face."
His hand moves toward Wraith like he's considering trying to help, but Wraith lets out a dangerous rumbling growl. Thane backs off, settling in on my other side instead.
"Okay. So you're the only one allowed near him, I take it," Thane sighs.
"Yeah. He isn't doing well," I murmur. "Claire attacked him and tore his mask off. And he just... shut down."
Thane's jaw tightens. He's quiet for a long time again, then he starts unpacking more dry clothes and blankets from his bag. He spreads them around us, building a messy but functional alpha version of a nest. He reminds me of a gigantic, overly serious eagle with no sense of structure or design.
At all.
"Do you know why they're like that?" he asks finally, not looking at me. "His teeth, I mean. Why they're… sharp."
"A little, but not really," I admit.
"He can't chew normally," Thane says, voice carefully neutral.
"Without lips or cheeks to keep food in his mouth, they had to...
" He trails off, gesturing vaguely. "Feral alphas already have sharper teeth than usual.
But they shaped his on purpose so he could tear and gnash food instead of chewing it.
Think he would've rather been stuck with smoothies, but he was a kid. He didn't exactly have agency."
"Oh." I swallow hard. Every new detail I learn makes the horror of his suffering even worse. "Has he been in a state like this before?"
"Yeah," Thane says, dragging a hand through his drenched hair, pushing it back from his face.
"Sometimes it lasts a few days. He always snaps out of it when there's a game.
Hockey brings him back. It's our anchor.
But with half the team in Canada and Valek having some kind of emergency…
who the fuck knows what's happening with the game next week. "
"That's your happy place, isn't it?" I ask. "As a team, I mean."
Thane chuckles, the sound rumbling through his chest. "Yeah. The ice makes sense when nothing else does."
I press closer to Wraith and his arms tighten slightly around me. Not much, but enough to know some part of him is still aware. Still fighting to come back.
"Speaking of Canada… have you heard from Plague and Whiskey?" I ask. "I have absolutely zero signal out here."
"Nope," Thane mutters. "Last I heard, they were stalking Valek at the hospital. Knowing those two prideful assholes, silence means something went sideways and they're figuring out a way to tell me without getting reamed out."
I swallow hard. "By 'sideways,' do you mean…?"
"Dead?" He manages a rough laugh. "Nah. I'd feel that through our bonds. Even when we hate each other, we're all connected. But they definitely fucked something up."
I know what he means. I really can feel it too, although not as much as he seems to be able to.
I don't know what to make of it. I just met the rest of the pack, and my inner omega is already plucking tentatively at the same threads of the pack bonds Thane is talking about.
I’ve already chosen Wraith. It makes sense that the rest of his bonded pack wouldn’t just be random alphas to me, however little I know them.
And after three of the four alphas in the Ghosts pack got me through my heat, regardless of how I'm tempted to keep the walls up, my omega side is unfurling hesitant tendrils of her own and reaching out toward theirs.
Like ivy.
"I think you guys need me as much as I need you," I say quietly.
"Maybe," Thane admits. "Probably. Okay. Definitely."
The three of us lie there in the dark tent, surrounded by the sounds of rain and forest and night. It's not the motel room we planned on. It's not comfortable or warm or safe in any conventional sense.
But somehow, with these two alphas wrapped around me, it feels like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.