Page 1 of Warded By His Wolf

Chapter 1

Blood and Confirmation

IVY

The blood in my mouth tasted like copper and confirmation.

I’d bitten through my cheek in my sleep again. My body’s way of telling me that what I’d seen wasn’t a dream.

It never was.

Ten fifteen p.m. Kitchen table. Three cold mugs I didn’t remember making. My vision journal open in front of me, the pages covered in three years of warnings I’d learned to soften before anyone could tell me I was wrong.

I was never wrong. That was the problem.

The face from tonight’s vision stared back at me from my own handwriting. Lean. Severe. Pale eyes with the patience of a predator who’d already decided he could wait longer than fear could last. I hadn’t invented him. I knew the difference between invention and vision, even if no one else had ever trusted me to know it.

I flipped to a page from three weeks ago. My handwriting, softened with qualifiers. It’s probably nothing, but. Miriam Vale lived in that margin: three years of professional kindness that had taught me to doubt myself so thoroughly I’d thanked her for it.

I was done with probably nothing.

I picked up my phone and called the number Ella had made me save two months ago. Just in case, she’d said. Promise me.

I hadn’t meant the promise when I made it.

I meant it now.

The line connected on the second ring. A woman’s voice, neutral and efficient. “Pack Guard tip line. Go ahead.”

“I need to report a threat.” My own voice surprised me, steady, none of the usual softening. “I had a vision. Tonight. A man’s face. I don’t know his name, but I know what he wants, and I know it’s me.”

“Describe him.”

“Lean. Severe. Pale eyes, the kind that don’t hurry, because he’s already decided he doesn’t need to.” I heard myself say it plainly, no qualifiers, for the first time in three years. “The vision felt like a countdown. Not violence. Something worse. Patience.”

A pause on the line, brief and professional. “Someone will contact you shortly,” the woman said. “Please stay where you are.”

I hung up and sat in the clean, terrible silence of having done the thing I was afraid to do.

The knock came at ten forty-two.

Three raps. Even. Not urgent, not apologetic. Just present: the knock of a man who already knew I was going to open the door.

I stood with my hand on the knob, running the ritual I’d built over years of being told my instincts were unreliable. Is this an overreaction? Is the vision stress? Am I about to embarrass myself in front of a bored field agent who takes my name and leaves?

I opened the door.

He filled the frame the way weather fills a doorway. Not aggressive. Undeniable. Broad enough that the hallway looked built to the wrong scale around him, dark hair that needed a cut and didn’t look careless, a jaw that looked like it had been designed to make women stupid.

His eyes found mine before I’d finished registering the rest of him.

And the noise in my head went quiet.

Three years of running calculations without permission, vision fragments layered over conversations, threat-scanning every room out of habit, the constant low hum of watch the exits, read the tells, bracing for the thing no one else sees coming, all of it just stopped. For the first time since the visions started, my mind held one thought instead of forty.

Him.

Not fear. Not only attraction. Gravity, plain and simple, like something in my chest had just been recalibrated around a fixed point I hadn’t known I was missing until right now.