The doors opened, and Hazel stepped out wearing Aldrien’s body while Aldrien walked beside her wearing hers.
Hundreds of guests turned toward them at once, and for one terrible second Hazel forgot how to move entirely.
Then she remembered who she was supposed to be.
She straightened Aldrien’s shoulders and tried to summon whatever expression made grown warriors go quiet in his presence.
“Stop doing that,” Aldrien murmured without moving his lips.
“Doing what?”
“Whatever you’re doing with my face.”
“I’m trying to look like you.”
“You look constipated.”
She nearly stepped on his foot on purpose, but the crowd was watching, so she smiled instead and hoped it looked more like confidence than nausea.
Their families closed in immediately, both sides expecting the newlyweds to seem different now, softer, maybe a little embarrassed the way people usually were after a wedding night hadn’t quite happened yet.
Instead Hazel and Aldrien stood there stiff as fence posts, and it didn’t take long for someone to notice.
“You two look rather serious for newlyweds,” one of the older aunts said, laughing.
Hazel improvised before she could think better of it and slid an arm around Aldrien’s waist.
He went rigid beside her.
“We’re simply tired,” she said, and the crowd chuckled and moved on, satisfied.
It was only after the laughter died down that Hazel realized her hand was resting on her own waist, which was currently occupied by someone else entirely, and that thought alone made her want to peel her own skin off.
“Your hand,” Aldrien whispered.
“What?”
“It’s on my waist.”
“I know.”
“Move it.”
“Everyone is watching.”
So neither of them moved, and they stood there locked together looking, from the outside, exactly like a married couple, while on the inside both of them were quietly dying.
The first real test came when one of Aldrien’s senior warriors approached and addressed Hazel like she was the Alpha he’d known his entire life.
“Alpha, about tomorrow’s border patrol—”
Hazel’s mind went completely blank.
She had no idea what patrol he meant, what border, what any of it involved, and she opened her mouth with absolutely no plan for what would come out of it.
Aldrien stepped in smoothly before she could embarrass them both.
“We’ll discuss it after the reception.”
The warrior bowed and left satisfied, and Hazel shot Aldrien a grateful look that he answered with the smallest nod.
It wasn’t long before another pack member approached with a question, and then another, and Hazel began to understand that being Aldrien wasn’t just about looking intimidating.
People needed things from him constantly.
Decisions, approval, direction.
She started to understand why he always looked like sleep was a foreign concept to him.
Later, someone informed them that Aldrien had a council meeting scheduled for that evening, an Alpha meeting, and Hazel felt her stomach drop straight through the floor.
“I can’t possibly do that,” she hissed at him the moment they had a private corner.
“If I don’t attend, they’ll know something is wrong,” Aldrien said.
So he gave her a crash course, fast and dense, names and territories and current disputes, who could be trusted and who couldn’t, and none of it stuck the way she needed it to.
When he finished, he looked at her with an intensity she hadn’t expected.
“Don’t let them see you hesitate.”
“You make this look easy,” she said.
His expression shifted, something tired moving behind her own borrowed eyes.
“It isn’t.”
She walked into the council chamber that night and felt the entire room change the moment she entered.
Conversations stopped.
Nobody interrupted, nobody spoke out of turn, everyone simply waited, and Hazel finally understood why Aldrien’s reputation preceded him everywhere he went.
A council member challenged a recent decision, and Hazel felt the old urge rise in her to snap back the way she always did at home.
Instead she remembered his warning and answered calmly, working the problem the way she actually thought about things, not the way she imagined he would have.
To her own surprise, it worked.
The solution she offered wasn’t anything Aldrien would have proposed, but it solved the actual problem sitting in front of them.
The room went quiet again, and one council member finally said, “That’s… an interesting solution, Alpha.”
Hazel wanted to scream internally but nodded instead.
“Then implement it.”
They obeyed without question, and for the first time since the ritual had gone wrong, she thought she might actually survive this.
While she sat through council business, Aldrien was discovering that Hazel’s world came with its own kind of warfare.
Women surrounded him almost immediately, friends and cousins and pack members, all of them wanting details about the wedding, about the marriage, about everything.
“So,” one of them asked, leaning in, “what was your first night as husband and wife like?”
Aldrien nearly choked on nothing at all.
Another woman wanted to know if Hazel was happy.
A third wanted to know exactly what Aldrien had whispered to her during the ceremony, and he realized with growing horror that Hazel’s supposedly peaceful world was simply a different kind of battlefield, fought with questions instead of blades.
That was when Evangeline Fox found him.
She watched him carefully, the way someone watches a person they’ve known their whole life and suddenly can’t quite place.
She asked him something small and personal, something only Hazel should have known, and Aldrien answered correctly because he had access to Hazel’s memories now.
But his answer came out too formal, too careful, nothing like the way Hazel would have thrown it back at her.
Evangeline’s eyes narrowed.
“You’re acting strange.”
He smiled, hoping it looked casual.
“I’m married.”
“You’ve been married for approximately six hours.”
“Marriage changes people.”
She didn’t look convinced, and something in her expression told him this wasn’t the last time she’d be watching him closely.
They found each other again well after midnight, both of them thoroughly wrecked.
Hazel collapsed into a chair the moment she reached their room.
“Your council is terrifying,” she said.
“Your friends are terrifying,” Aldrien answered, dropping into the seat across from her.
“Evangeline?”
“Especially Evangeline.”
Hazel laughed, and then he told her about the questions he’d fielded all evening, and she laughed even harder, loud and unguarded, until they were both laughing together instead of arguing for the first time since any of this began.
“I thought you enjoyed being an Alpha,” she finally said, when the laughter faded.
He went quiet.
“Why?”
“Because you always look so certain.”
“That’s because everyone expects me to.”
The admission sat there between them, small and unexpectedly honest, and Hazel found herself seeing something she hadn’t looked for before.
“They don’t fear you because you’re cruel,” she said.
“They fear disappointing you. You built something people depend on.”
He didn’t answer right away, clearly unsure what to do with an actual compliment from her, and then he ruined it exactly the way she should have predicted.
“You almost destroyed it within five minutes.”
She threw a cushion at his head.
He caught it, and smiled at her over it, and for a moment neither of them looked like enemies at all.
Later, as they prepared for a bed neither of them wanted to think too hard about, Hazel caught her reflection in the mirror, Aldrien’s reflection, and for the first time she didn’t see the man she’d spent years despising.
She saw someone exhausted underneath all that armor.
Across the room, Aldrien looked at her, at the face he’d built a reputation around without ever really knowing the person behind it.
“Tomorrow, you’re teaching me how to be you,” Hazel finally said.
“And you’re teaching me how to be you.”
A pause settled between them before he added, “Deal?”
He extended his hand.
She shook it, both of them fully aware they were shaking hands that technically belonged to each other, and neither one let go quite as quickly as they should have.