They left pack territory just after sunrise, with what felt like half the pack gathered to see them off.
Everyone waved and called out blessings for the journey, treating the whole thing like the romantic gesture Wystan had built it to be.
Hazel waved back from Aldrien’s body, smiling in a way that looked almost natural after enough practice, while Aldrien stood beside her wearing Hazel’s face and doing his best imitation of the same expression.
Someone near the gate shouted something about wishing them a beautiful journey together, and neither of them had any idea how to respond to that without sounding ridiculous, so they simply smiled harder and kept walking until the crowd finally thinned out behind them.
Once they were far enough down the road that nobody could see their faces anymore, Hazel dropped the smile entirely.
“I never want to smile that much again in my life,” she said.
Aldrien found himself agreeing completely.
It was exhausting work, performing happiness for an audience that expected it constantly, and he had a new appreciation for exactly how much of Hazel’s life apparently required exactly that.
Then the reality of it settled over both of them at once.
They were alone.
No Wystan trailing behind to smooth things over.
No Evangeline offering unsolicited advice.
No pack watching their every move.
It didn’t take long for their first disagreement to surface.
Aldrien wanted the most direct route to the shrine, the shortest distance covered in the fewest days, minimal stops along the way.
Hazel wanted actual meals, real breaks, somewhere decent to sleep each night instead of whatever patch of ground happened to be convenient.
“We don’t need to stop every hour,” Aldrien said, studying the map she’d unfolded across a rock.
“We’re not stopping every hour. We’re stopping when it makes sense.”
“It makes sense to keep moving.”
Neither of them wanted to concede the point, but eventually Hazel simply took the map out of his hands entirely and started plotting their route herself, factoring in villages where they could rest properly and stretches where the terrain would slow them down regardless of how much either of them wanted to push through it.
Aldrien let her keep it, mostly because arguing further felt like more effort than it was worth, and partly because, if he was honest with himself, her instincts on this particular subject were probably better than his.
The horses waited for them a short distance ahead, and Hazel approached Aldrien’s with the confidence of someone who assumed the animal would simply obey whoever was currently occupying that body.
It didn’t.
The horse shifted away from her, ears back, clearly unconvinced.
“It doesn’t trust you,” Aldrien’s wolf informed her, apparently amused by the whole situation.
Hazel looked genuinely offended by that.
“It’s supposed to recognize me. I’m literally standing in his body.”
The horse recognized the wolf, not simply the shape wearing it, and Aldrien’s wolf had to reach toward the animal directly before it finally settled enough to let Hazel approach.
Aldrien found the entire exchange quietly hilarious, watching her attempt to reason with a horse that clearly wasn’t interested in reasoning with anyone at the moment.
“Something funny?” she asked, glaring at him from beside the animal’s flank.
“Not at all,” he said, though his expression suggested otherwise.
They stopped for lunch somewhere with a decent view, a stretch of grass near a stream that Hazel had apparently marked on the map specifically for this purpose.
It turned into the first genuinely comfortable stretch of the entire journey, no arguing over routes, no pretending for an audience, just the two of them and whatever food Hazel had packed.
She asked him, somewhere between bites, why he’d become so intent on being a flawless Alpha, always in control, never allowing himself a moment of visible weakness.
He avoided the question at first, turning it over before deciding whether he actually wanted to answer it honestly.
“Everyone depends on me,” he finally said.
“I learned early that I couldn’t afford to be careless. One wrong decision, and it’s not just my life that suffers for it.”
Hazel didn’t tease him about it, didn’t reach for the easy joke the way she might have weeks ago.
“You don’t always have to carry everything yourself,” she said instead.
Further down the road, she offered something of her own in return, admitting that people always assumed she was carefree simply because she was outspoken and social, quick with a comment, never short on opinions.
What most people never saw was how much she hated disappointing her family, how much pressure came with representing the Pinecrest name in every room she walked into.
Aldrien understood, listening to her, that they’d both spent years performing strength neither of them fully possessed, each convinced the other had it easier.
Neither of them argued the point once it was laid out plainly between them.
They reached their first resting place well before sunset, a small inn tucked along the road that Hazel had marked for exactly this purpose.
The innkeeper greeted them warmly, congratulated them on their marriage, and informed them, with obvious pride, that he’d saved his finest room for the newlyweds.
There was, of course, only one bed.
They stared at each other again, the same standoff they’d faced their very first night in the Alpha residence.
But something about it felt different this time.
Neither of them immediately launched into an argument about who would take the floor.
Neither of them insisted the couch would somehow work despite being far too small.
“We can manage,” Aldrien finally said.
That’s what you said last time, Hazel’s wolf remarked, dry and entirely too knowing.
Hazel ignored the comment, though Aldrien caught the faint flicker of something crossing her expression that suggested she’d heard it too.
They settled in for the night without much further discussion, the room quiet except for the occasional sound drifting up from the inn below.
Aldrien lay there listening to her breathing even out across the small space between them, and found himself thinking about the conversation from earlier, about the way she’d looked at him when she told him he didn’t have to carry everything alone.
Somewhere in the dark, Hazel realized something that unsettled her more than she expected it to.
She wasn’t dreading this.
She wasn’t lying awake counting the hours until they reached the shrine and this forced closeness ended.
If anything, she wasn’t sure she wanted it to end at all.
And that, more than anything about wolves or moonstones or ancient rituals, felt like the real problem she hadn’t prepared herself for.