Chapter 49 – Training Ground (Ivy’s POV)

Chapter 49 – Training Ground (Ivy’s POV)
The next morning, I was up for a section of my life I had not practiced for quite some time. Perhaps, if I was still running around with the police, all these could have been much easier. But now, here I was, on a foreign training ground.

“Again,” he said, like a liturgy.

I threw the combination he’d taught me—jab, cross, hook, pivot—into the padded shield he held.

“Keep your chin down,” he said, tapping my jaw with two fingers. “You’ve got detective posture. Pretty. Useless.”

I held my anger.

We moved through drills that looked simple until my legs shook. Around us, other wolves trained as their weights clanged, claws flashed in control and breath plumed. Every time I glanced up, someone was watching me with a stiffness that wasn’t disrespect. It took me ten minutes to recognize it.

“They’re… saluting me,” I muttered when Sierra sent me to water.

“They’re honouring the Alpha’s mate,” he corrected, eyeing my grip on the bottle. “Don’t crush it.”

“I am not—”

He lifted a palm. “I know what you say. I’m telling you what they see. You fighting off the enemy on our floors, waking beside the boss, putting our Alpha back on his feet when a silver round should have put him under. They don’t need a ceremony to read a bond.”

I looked down at my hands. They shook. “They’re wrong.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. Finish your water.”

We went again. He corrected everything from wrists to breath, stance and all. It should have made me want to bite him. It did. But it also made the world return to a sensible scale fair enough.

At some point I felt him watching from the balcony. Damian. I didn’t have to see him to know; my skin recognized the gravity he carried. My body betrayed me with a small, fierce surge of heat when he was close.

“Eyes,” Sierra said, flicking his fingers. “On me.”

I rolled mine. “You wish.”

“Everyone does,” he deadpanned, then caught my wrist mid-swing and reversed me so quickly my stomach did a cartwheel. I hit the mat, breath gone, ceiling spinning.

He crouched, forearm across my collarbone just shy of pain. “Say you’re not a wolf again,” he said, amused.

“I’m not,” I rasped.

He nodded toward my hand. My fingers had locked around his bicep in a grip no human should’ve had at the end of an hour of drills. The muscle under my palm felt like steel, and I still held him.

“Let go,” he said, softly.

I tried. My fingers didn’t answer.

“Breathe with it, not at it,” he said. “In through the nose. Let the grip follow the air. Not the other way around.”

I did as he said, and the world widened a notch. My fingers unhooked like stubborn ivy from a fence post. Sierra rocked back to give me space to sit up.

“What you did some days ago,” he said, “most people call a glitch. Here we call it a door opening from the inside.”

I got to my knees, dizzy, furious, frightened. “I don’t want a door.”

“We don’t always get to want,” he said, not unkind. “We get to learn.”

“I’m not a project,” I shot back. “I’m not your glittering hybrid to break in and parade.”

“You’re not,” he agreed. “You’re a woman who keeps choosing to live. I like that about you. It makes my job easier.”

He offered his hand. I took it. He hauled me up like I weighed nothing.

“Again?” he asked.

“Again,” I said, because the alternative was to crawl to my room and pretend hiding was a plan.

We worked until my thighs trembled. Somewhere in there, Damian left the balcony; I felt the drag of his absence like a tide going out. I hated that I noticed.

When Sierra finally called it, my vision had whites at the edges. He pressed a cool bottle into my hand and nodded toward the edge of the yard.

“Walk with me,” he said.

We looped a path along the rosemary hedges and the low brick wall that marked the old south boundary. Birds fussed in the cypress. The house loomed to our right.

“I asked some men we have in the city for your file,” he said conversationally, as if we were talking about movies. “Your academy scores. Your first arrest. Everything else Ivy ‘Isabella’ Romano.”

I stopped dead. “You what?”

He grinned. “Relax. I didn’t read it to write your eulogy. I wanted to know what you do when corners get tight.”

“And?” I asked, bristling.

“You keep your mouth clean until it’s time to land a shot,” he said. “Then you say the thing no one else has the nerve to say, and you don’t flinch when the room goes quiet.”

I had no answer for that. It wasn’t a threat. It wasn’t even flattery. It sounded like respect, and that was worse.

“I’m not here to make you one of us,” he added. “I’m here to make sure if you decide to be none of us, you can still walk out.”

My throat worked. “Why would you help me with that?”

“Because the Alpha asked me to,” he replied abruptly. I felt my chest tighten.

We reached the last cypress at the corner of the yard. A faint scent curled around it—a note that didn’t belong to rosemary or morning or our sweat. My skin prickled.

Sierra smelled it too. He went very still, not from fear or alarm but more like a cataloging.

“What?” I whispered.

He put a finger to his lips and crouched, studying the grass at the base of the tree. A boot print, just outside the grounds. He touched the crushed blades and lifted his fingers to his nose.

“Human,” he said. “Male. New. He stood here long enough to get bored.”

My stomach cinched tight. Ethan? One of Matteo’s? Sierra’s face had gone all professional angles.

“We’re going to circle left,” he said calmly. “Not run. Not point. Not make a show.”

“And if he’s still here?” I asked.

“Then we introduce him to the part of my job that’s less friendly,” he said, with a smile that had no warmth at all.

We turned. I kept my breathing even. The house, for the first time, felt less like a prison and more like a chest with a heart inside it. Mine. Theirs. His.

We were halfway back when my phone vibrated. A text preview bloomed across the screen:

Nice form out there, Detective. Tell your boyfriend to widen his patrols.

A photo followed—green and grainy. It was me, shot from behind with gloves on, ponytail high, throwing a cross into Sierra’s pad.

Sierra’s hand closed over my wrist before the panic could, steadying, a quiet iron. He read the screen, jaw flexing once.

“Who?” I whispered.

“Someone who thinks he’s close enough,” Sierra said calmly. He took my phone, hit a speed dial I didn’t know he had, and lifted it to his ear.

“Alpha,” he said when the line picked up. “We have a visitor.”