**Savannah’s POV**
I stood in front of the open wardrobe for a long time.
Dark colors, all of it.
Functional cuts, practical fabrics.
Training gear, combat vests, a few jackets that could pass as civilian clothing if you didn’t look too closely.
Nothing that belonged in the hall of an Alpha Heir’s Ball.
Nothing that wouldn’t announce, the moment I walked through the door, exactly how far outside that world I’d been living for six years.
My phone rang.
Leo.
“Let me guess,” he said, with the confidence of someone who has known me long enough to be annoying about it.
“You’re standing in front of your wardrobe right now, trying to find a reason to cancel.”
“I’m conducting a realistic assessment of your invitation,” I said.
“I’ve already solved the realistic problems.” His excitement was doing its best to stay contained in his voice and mostly failing.
“I ordered something from Paris.
Moon-silver, the designer called it.
He said it was made for a goddess of the moon.” A pause.
“I saw it and I thought of you immediately.”
“Leo—”
“Don’t,” he said, and the lightness in his voice dropped into something that didn’t leave room for argument.
“Consider it payment for every brutal thing you’ve done to my footwork over the last three years.
You cannot say no to this.” Another pause, and this one was careful in a way the others hadn’t been.
“Also, I already spoke to Theodore.
He’s happy to watch Finn that evening.”
I didn’t answer right away.
Theodore.
Happy to watch Finn.
It was a small thing.
It was also not a small thing at all — it was a grandfather asking for the chance to be one, a man trying to use the specific currency of *being useful* because he didn’t have the language yet for what he actually wanted to say.
Two weeks ago, Finn’s grandfather had been an abstract concept.
Now he was a man who would sit on the floor and tell stories about wolves if that was what Finn asked for.
“All right,” I said finally.
“Thank you, Leo.”
“Don’t thank me.
Just show up.”
The moon had come up — bigger here than it ever looked in Seattle, closer somehow, like this territory had a different relationship with it.
I stood there and let myself look at it for a moment, just that, without thinking about anything else.
Then I called my father.
He picked up on the second ring, which told me he’d been awake.
I told him Finn had been deep in a book called *Tales of the Wolf Clans* for the past week and would almost certainly demand story time.
I heard something shift in his voice at that detail — a specific kind of softening that belongs to men who have been wanted by a child and are still getting used to the feeling.
“I’ll take good care of him,” he said.
“I know,” I said, and meant it, and that surprised me a little.
I stood at the window after I hung up, and I made the mistake of letting my mind go somewhere I hadn’t given it permission to go.
Declan would be at the ball.
Of course he would — it was an Alliance formal event, and he was Iron Ridge’s heir, and his attendance wasn’t optional.
Celeste would be there too.
She would find him in the first twenty minutes, and her hand would find his arm, and she would arrange herself against his side with the practiced ease of someone who had been rehearsing that particular performance for years.
The image arrived in my head fully formed, uninvited, complete with details I had no business supplying.
Along with it came a feeling I had no right to.
“Stop,” I said quietly.
To the window, to the moon, to the version of myself that was apparently developing opinions about Declan Voss’s social calendar.
“You don’t get to feel that.”
I crossed to the mirror.
Looked at the woman in it for a long, honest moment.
There were scars, the kind that had faded but not disappeared.
There were shadows under her eyes that six years of fighting and single parenting had put there and that no amount of sleep would fully erase.
There was something in her face that had been soft once, that the last six years had refined into something harder and less forgiving.
But she stood straight.
Her chin was level.
Her eyes looked back at me without flinching.
“You are not the terrified eighteen-year-old who crossed that border alone,” I said to her. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
She said it back.
Small footsteps in the hallway.
The particular sound of Finn at night — he had a specific shuffle when he was half-asleep, dragging his feet just slightly, too tired to lift them all the way.
He appeared in the doorway with his stuffed wolf tucked under his arm and his eyes at about sixty percent open, hair doing several different things at once.
“Mom.” His voice was the slow, blurry version.
“Are you going to wear a pretty dress?”
“I am,” I said.
“Leo got me a silver one.”
He processed this with the gravity it deserved.
Stood there for a moment in his pajamas with his stuffed wolf, genuinely thinking it through.
Then he looked up at me with the absolute certainty that six-year-olds carry when they have reached a conclusion.
“Then you’ll definitely be the most beautiful one there.”
Something in my chest cracked open, just a little, just briefly, in the way it only did for him.
I crossed the room and picked him up, both arms, and he came without protest, tucking himself against me with the easy familiarity of someone who had always known exactly where he fit.
I pressed my face into the curve of his neck, breathing him in.
Pine and sunshine, the specific Finn smell that had been my north star for six years, the thing I navigated by when everything else went dark.
The complicated feelings — the ones about silver dresses and formal halls and a pair of amber-brown eyes that shouldn’t matter to me and did anyway — all of it compressed down, pushed back, held under by the simple and total weight of this.
He was why.
He was always why.
Whatever Friday brought, I would walk into that hall on my own terms, in a silver dress, and I would be exactly who I’d rebuilt myself into.
No apologies.
No performances.
No pretending to be smaller or simpler or less than I was.
Finn made a small, sleepy sound against my shoulder.
I held on and let that be enough.
The quiet settled around both of us, and somewhere outside the moon kept doing what it always did — rising, steady and indifferent and bright, pulling at everything below it whether they wanted it to or not.
I breathed out slowly.
And felt something compress into the particular kind of calm that made it possible to move forward.