They set out from the settlement with the new map tucked into Hazel’s bag, and Aldrien was still adjusting to the lingering sensitivity in her body, moving carefully whenever his shirt shifted the wrong way.
Hazel noticed, glancing at him more than once, but wisely kept her mouth shut about it this time.
They reviewed the route as they walked.
Blackwood behind them now, the Silverroad carrying them steadily toward the edge of the Wildwood, and beyond that, Moonfall Valley and the Veiled Mountains waiting somewhere past the horizon.
The Wildwood was the first genuinely unfamiliar stretch either of them would be crossing, and the closer they got to its edge, the denser the trees became.
Hazel filled the silence as they walked, explaining what little she actually knew about the forest ahead.
It belonged to neither pack officially, home instead to smaller wolf clans who kept mostly to themselves, scattered among old territorial markers and shrines nobody bothered to maintain anymore.
Ancient roads ran beneath the undergrowth in places, buried by centuries of growth, remnants of a time before either the Blacks or the Pinecrests had claimed anything.
Aldrien studied the map again as she talked, running his thumb along the edge of the parchment.
It felt older than it should have, the ink faded in places that suggested decades rather than years.
“Who do you think mapped this route originally,” he asked, more to himself than to her.
Hazel didn’t have an answer, and neither of them pushed the question further.
The marked road disappeared beneath a wall of vegetation not long after they crossed into the forest proper, vines and undergrowth swallowing whatever path had once been there.
Aldrien assumed immediately they’d taken a wrong turn somewhere.
“We didn’t,” Hazel said, studying the map against the trees around them.
“Then explain why the road just stops.”
“Maybe the forest changed. Maps don’t always account for a hundred years of growth.”
They argued over it for a few minutes, both convinced they were right, until it became clear the map genuinely hadn’t been wrong to begin with.
The forest simply hadn’t cooperated with whoever had drawn it so long ago.
Aldrien wanted to rely on instinct, certain his Alpha senses would find them a path forward the way they usually did on familiar ground.
Instead, she started noticing smaller things.
A branch broken at an angle that suggested something larger than an animal had passed through recently.
Old paw prints pressed into softened earth.
Stones set in a line too deliberate to be natural.
Eventually she found a faded moonstone marker half buried beneath moss, and beyond it, the ghost of an old road winding deeper into the trees.
Aldrien stared at it for a moment.
“You were right.”
Hazel actually stopped walking.
“Did you just say that?”
“Don’t make me regret it.”
She smiled to herself and kept moving, and he found he didn’t mind the small victory nearly as much as he expected to.
They reached a narrow stream crossing not long after, a scattering of flat stones offering the only way across.
The stones were slick with moss, and Hazel, still adjusting to the size and weight of Aldrien’s body, misjudged her footing halfway across.
Her balance tipped, and before she could catch herself, Aldrien reached out and grabbed her, which meant, in the strange logic their situation had created, that he was grabbing his own hand, holding onto the body he technically still owned.
For a second neither of them moved.
They stood there on the slick stones, close enough that Hazel could feel the warmth radiating off him, both of them staring at each other through bodies that weren’t their own, and something about it felt far more intimate than either of them was prepared to admit out loud.
“You can let go now,” Hazel finally said, breaking the silence.
Aldrien let go, though it took him a beat longer than it should have.
They couldn’t reach the next settlement before dark, so they made camp instead, and Hazel watched, genuinely surprised, as Aldrien moved through the process with obvious skill.
He built a fire without wasting time, prepared a simple meal from what they’d packed, and set up their camp in a way that made the space feel secure, tucked far enough from the road that they wouldn’t be easily noticed.
“Did you actually expect to spend your life alone in the wilderness?” she asked, settling near the fire.
“An Alpha should know how to survive without servants,” he said, feeding another branch into the flames. Find the original chapter at g.com.
“Depending entirely on others is how you get caught unprepared.”
It was another small crack in the image she’d carried of him for years, the intimidating, untouchable Alpha turning out to be someone who’d clearly spent real time learning to fend for himself, long before any of this ever became necessary.
They sat by the fire once the meal was finished, and Hazel found herself asking something she’d never thought to ask before any of this started.
“What did you actually want, before you became Alpha? Before any of this was decided for you?”
He considered the question longer than she expected.
“I don’t think I ever really believed I had a choice. It was always going to be me.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“I know,” he admitted, and something in the honesty of that felt heavier than any answer would have.
He turned the question back on her, asking what she’d wanted for herself before her life became defined by an arranged marriage and a family name she had to represent everywhere she went.
She struggled to answer it properly, turning the question over in a way that told him she’d never actually let herself consider it before either.
For once, neither of them reached for something clever to fill the silence.
They simply sat with it, both of them realizing, in their own way, that the person they’d spent years despising had been shaped by circumstances neither of them had ever bothered to look at closely.
Just as they were finally settling in for the night, Hazel noticed something carved into the bark of a nearby tree, faint but deliberate.
A moonstone symbol, the same one marked on their map.
Beneath it sat a second symbol neither of them recognized.
Aldrien leaned closer, studying it in the firelight.
“This wasn’t on the map.”
Hazel reached out and touched the carving, tracing the unfamiliar lines with her fingers.
Somewhere deeper in the forest, a wolf howled, long and clear, and neither of them moved for a long moment afterward.