Unbonding the Ruthless Alpha novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Ten Unanswered Links
Ivy loses her pup in a crash, sends her Alpha ten mindlinks, and finds him holding his first love's hand upstairs; when he leaves her on the roadside for another call, she tells Hazel to file the Moon Right.
I sent Ronan ten mindlinks from the back of an ambulance, and he answered none of them.
The first one said there had been an accident.
The fourth said I was bleeding.
The tenth said please.
Each one went out along the pack link and stopped against something shut.
A truck had run the stop sign on the county highway and folded in the driver's side of my car.
I was eleven weeks pregnant, and the only person who knew was our pack healer.
I had planned to tell Ronan at his grandfather's dinner, where he couldn't walk out on it.
At seven the next morning, a doctor sat on the end of my bed and told me the pup was gone.
When she left, a nurse came in to take my blood pressure.
"Your husband's upstairs," she said. "Fourth floor. He's been here all night."
For one second I felt relief, and I was ashamed of it later.
I put my father's old gray coat on over the hospital gown and took the elevator up.
The VIP ward had carpet and a vase of lilies at the nurses' station.
Through the glass of the last room, I saw Ronan in a chair pulled up to the bed.
He was holding Mirelle Foxworth's hand, and his thumb was moving over her knuckles.
Mirelle was his first love, and four months ago she had come back to Stonebrook, alone and expecting.
She saw me first.
"Ivy!" She put her free hand to her chest. "Oh, thank God. Ronan told me you were hurt. I begged him to stay with me, it was only an hour, he was just about to go to you."
She said it so gently that I almost thanked her.
The ambulance had picked me up at eleven the night before, and it was seven now.
Ronan stood, but he didn't let go of her hand until he was on his feet.
A nurse stepped in front of me in the doorway.
"Ma'am, this ward is family only."
"I'm his wife," I said.
She checked the clipboard.
"Ms. Foxworth's family list says Mr. Hargrove and nobody else. I'm sorry."
"That's a mix-up," Mirelle said. "I'll fix it, Ivy, I promise."
She didn't fix it.
Ronan came out into the hall and pulled the door half shut behind him.
He looked at my coat, my bare ankles and the plastic bracelet on my wrist, and he saw none of it.
"Not now, Ivy," he said. "Go home. I'll send the car."
"I sent you ten links."
"I closed the link so nothing would reach Mirelle's room."
"Ten," I said.
"Then I would have heard them."
He went back inside.
The nurse took me down to the first floor by the elbow, and she was kind about it, which was worse.
Back at the big house, I went to the bedroom closet and pushed my winter coats aside.
Behind them, in a shopping bag from a store in Cedar Hollow, were the things I had bought in secret.
A yellow hat. A gray blanket. Six tiny socks, folded in pairs.
I sat down on the closet floor and held one sock in my fist until the seam printed itself into my palm.
Ronan found me there at four, still in the same shirt.
"Grandfather expects you at the monthly dinner," he said. "Wear the green dress."
Godfrey sent his car for me on the first Sunday of every month and sat me at his right hand.
He poured my wine himself.
He had never once said Gordon's name, not even at my father's funeral.
He was the one person in that family who was ever kind to me, and I went because of that.
I was Ronan's mate because my father owed his family a death, and I had been paying it for two years.
I put on the green dress and said nothing.
Ronan drove.
At the light on the highway, we passed the place where my car still sat in the ditch, with broken glass glittering around it.
Ronan didn't turn his head.
His phone lit up on the dash with Mirelle's name.
"Hey," he said, and his voice went low in a way I had never heard it go for me. "Breathe. Slow. I'm coming. Don't get up."
He ended the call and put on his turn signal.
"I need to go back," he said. "Grandfather's driver will pick you up at the next stop."
He pulled onto the gravel shoulder, ten feet from my wrecked car.
I looked at his hands on the wheel, and then I looked at the glass in the ditch.
My wolf, which had been whimpering for a day, went quiet and stepped back from the bond.
"Okay," I said.
I opened the door.
"Ivy, it's two minutes," he said.
So I stepped out.
His tires spat gravel when he left.
I stood on the shoulder in the green dress with my hand flat on my empty stomach, and I opened the pack link to one person only.
"Hazel, it's Ivy," I said. "File the Moon Right."
It is the one thing pack law gives a Luna who has lost a pup: she can ask the Council to cut her bond.
It took her half a breath to answer.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Then don't just file it," Hazel said. "Say it at his grandfather's table, where nobody can bury it."
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