The Alpha residence had gone quiet in a way Hazel wasn’t used to.
No servants knocking with schedules.
No warriors waiting outside the door.
No council members demanding decisions before she’d even had her tea.
Just her, sitting by the window, and Aldrien across the room with a stack of paperwork he wasn’t really reading anymore.
Normally this kind of silence would have felt like an opportunity, the kind of gap she’d have filled with something sharp just to hear him snap back.
Tonight she didn’t feel the pull to fill it at all.
She sat there and let it stretch, and somewhere in the middle of it she realized she wasn’t uncomfortable anymore.
Aldrien looked up eventually.
Their eyes met, and neither of them looked away right away.
“How was your day?” Hazel asked, and she meant it, not as a jab, not as the opening move of an argument.
He seemed to notice that too, because he actually answered properly, telling her about a minor issue with the eastern border, a patrol that had come back with conflicting reports that needed sorting out before it became a real problem.
She listened without interrupting, and when he finished, he asked about hers.
She told him about Selene, about the whole conversation, and he apologized for the trouble even though none of it had been his doing.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said.
A small silence settled after that, easy instead of tense.
“We’re getting strangely good at this,” she said.
“At what?”
“Not fighting.”
He considered that for a moment.
“Maybe we’re both just tired.”
“Probably,” she said, though neither of them sounded entirely convinced.
The conversation drifted somewhere neither of them had steered it, back toward when they were younger, the first time they’d met, the first real argument they’d ever had, all the ridiculous things they used to compete over just to prove a point to each other.
Hazel remembered thinking, even back then, that he’d hated her from the very beginning.
He didn’t answer right away, and when he did, there wasn’t anything clever hiding behind it.
“You were always challenging me.”
“You hated that?”
“I hated that you weren’t afraid of me.”
That caught her off guard.
She’d always assumed it was because she irritated him, because she talked back when everyone else fell in line.
She hadn’t considered that it might have been something closer to respect twisted into resentment, that she was one of the only people who’d ever treated him like a person instead of a title.
She looked down at her hands.
“I thought you hated me.”
“I did,” he said, simple and unguarded.
The honesty of it landed harder than she expected.
She’d braced for him to soften it, to wrap it in some excuse, and he hadn’t bothered.
He explained, quietly, that their rivalry had become a habit somewhere along the way, that every argument had built on the last one until neither of them had bothered questioning whether the hatred still made sense.
“So we just kept hating each other because we’d already decided we were supposed to,” she said.
He didn’t answer that, mostly because there wasn’t anything to add.
That was exactly what had happened.
She told him what the past few days had done to her understanding of things, how confusing it had all become, seeing the weight he carried every single day, the way people actually depended on him.
He admitted he’d learned things about her too, things he’d never bothered to notice before this whole mess started.
“I don’t think I understood you,” she admitted.
“I didn’t understand you either,” he said.
It wasn’t a full apology from either of them.
That would have felt too easy, too convenient after years of built-up resentment.
But there was something in the quiet after it, an unspoken agreement that they’d both gotten it wrong.
She wasn’t sure when they’d ended up sitting so close together.
Somewhere in the conversation the space between them had shrunk without either of them noticing it happen.
She found herself looking at his face, her own face technically, and yet after everything she’d learned to see it differently over the past several days.
When he was exhausted.
When he was trying not to smile and failing at it.
When he was worried about something and refused to say so.
He noticed her staring.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said, and didn’t look away.
The air between them shifted into something she didn’t have a name for yet.
Not quite romantic, but charged in a way that made her very aware of how little space separated them.
She gathered enough nerve to ask the thing she’d been circling around all evening.
“I thought you hated me,” she said again, quieter this time.
“I did,” he repeated.
Her heart picked up its pace, and she studied him carefully, searching for whatever might come next.
“And now?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
He just looked at her, and for the first time there was no sarcasm waiting to cut the tension, no argument ready to give either of them an easy way out.
His silence sat there between them, heavy enough that she could feel it, and it told her something without actually telling her anything at all.
She waited.
His eyes dropped briefly to her mouth before returning to hers, and something in her chest tightened at that, small and involuntary.
Her wolf, usually quick with some commentary, went completely silent.
Across from her, Aldrien’s wolf didn’t offer him anything either, and for the first time since any of this began, it felt like both of them understood that something had shifted into territory neither wolf wanted to tease its way through.
Hazel finally looked away first, unable to hold his gaze any longer without saying something she wasn’t ready to say.
But long after the moment had passed, she couldn’t stop wondering what his answer would have been if he’d let himself give one.
And across the room, Aldrien sat with the same question turning over in his chest, unable to understand why the two simplest words in the world, I still do, had refused to come when he needed them most.