Chapter 5

Whatever Serena was about to say stopped cold.

Her face went white. She stared up at Damon as his face turned to stone.

"Serena. She's not dead. And she'll never be dead."

"You saved my life. Fine. But I settled that debt with my body a long time ago. I knew you wanted me, but because you saved my life I could never find a reason to refuse you."

"But Ivy… she's dead. She left me like that. I can't keep tangled up with you anymore."

"I'm going to find that nurse. Make her say who killed my pup. Wherever she goes, I'll find her. I'll kill her myself."

Serena had never seen Damon this harsh.

In her memory, Damon was always sharp and decisive but proud, too proud for petty dirt.

Except around Ivy.

She'd wanted Damon for a long time.

If she hadn't been cornered into accepting a one-month courtship from another High Pack Heir back then, Ivy would never have had the chance to accept Damon's Marking offer.

That thought brought a flash of hatred to Serena's face.

Damon let go of her neck. He drove straight to Pack Enforcement Headquarters, where his old friend Callum Hartley ran the investigation unit.

With Enforcement involved, the killer couldn't run far.

But the minute he told Callum what happened, Callum stared at him like he was an idiot.

"You didn't know?"

Damon blanked. "Know what?"

Callum's brow twisted tighter.

"Are you out of your mind? Are you really telling me you didn't know? Damon. Five years ago. I always thought you knew. You're telling me you didn't — and you had the wrong person this whole time?"

The words crushed down on Damon's chest.

He staggered back. His red-rimmed eyes kept shaking.

"You're saying… five years ago, the one who saved me was Ivy? Not Serena?"

"How could it not be her?" Callum sighed, walked into the records room, and came back with a small encrypted drive and a brown Pack evidence folder.

He handed it over, frustrated.

"All these years I didn't know how to tell you. Those Pack brothers around you stopped being ours a long time ago. They don't tell you the truth. They only feed you what she wants you to hear."

"Watch this footage. You'll see."

Damon sat with his hands locked on his knees, jaw tight.

The footage opened on the war-torn Rogue territory.

Five years of buried pain came rushing back.

Damon tried to match the footage with every memory that had been crushing him.

But the further he watched, the heavier his chest got.

The footage was from Ivy's point of view. He didn't know how she'd gotten it.

But he saw clearly. In the footage, when she heard he'd been taken, she ran thirty kilometers barefoot, crying.

In the end, foreign Rogue soldiers took turns on her. She didn't cry, didn't fight. She kept screaming.

"Can you go a little slower? My fiancé is still waiting for me to save him!"

Hearing those words, the ice locked around Damon's heart for five years melted into water.

What replaced it was a searing, airtight pain that flooded his mind.

His Ivy. His girl. She'd never abandoned him.

She had been protecting him her own way.

The camera shifted. Ivy was escaping the Rogues, running toward the signal tower.

That was where she could reach his Pack.

Damon's confusion peaked. If Ivy had already reached the signal tower, if she could have saved him — why did she then walk off with the local Rogue warlord?

The next frame showed Serena's smug face.

Her mouth curled in arrogance, the opposite of the weak, wounded girl she'd always been in front of him.

"Oh my — Ivy, look at you. Are you trying to call for help?"

Ivy snarled back.

"Serena, you ungrateful traitor. Damon and I picked you up. Paid your tuition. Found you a mate to a High Pack family. Is this how you repay us?"

"You want Damon dead? He's still waiting for me to save him!"

Damon's heart felt cut open a piece at a time. In those short minutes, he heard that sentence over and over.

He could only imagine how many times Ivy had said it in her own head to keep going, humiliation and all.

It was his life that kept her moving.

Damon understood everything now.

His lips trembled. His teeth chattered from hate.

"Five years ago. It was Serena who attached herself to the warlord. It was her who stole the credit. Wasn't it?"

Callum lowered his head, pained.

"Yes. I always thought you two had talked it out. Until you brought Serena home. I tried to explain to Ivy more than once. I told her I'd straighten it out for you two. She always smiled and told me to just do my job, not to get caught up. She said you had the pup now. She didn't want to drag anyone else in."