The knock came again, harder this time, and Aldrien shot Hazel a look sharp enough to mean stay quiet before the door opened and Wystan stepped inside.
His eyes moved between them, and Hazel could see him cataloging something without quite knowing what he was looking for.
She was standing there in Aldrien’s body.
Aldrien stood beside her in hers.
Wystan didn’t know the truth, not yet, but something in the room clearly wasn’t sitting right with him.
He addressed Hazel like she was Aldrien, the way he’d done a thousand times before.
“You asked me to come?”
She hadn’t, obviously, and she opened her mouth with nothing prepared to fill it.
Behind Wystan’s shoulder, Aldrien gave the smallest shake of his head, and Hazel latched onto it like a lifeline.
“Yes,” she said.
Wystan waited, and when nothing followed, he pressed.
“Why?”
“I wanted to see you.”
The silence that followed felt like it had physical weight.
Aldrien closed his eyes slowly, and Wystan’s expression shifted into something between confusion and concern.
“You wanted to see me?”
Hazel realized exactly how strange that sounded coming from an Alpha to his Beta and scrambled to correct it.
“As my Beta. Obviously.”
“Of course,” Wystan said, though he didn’t sound convinced.
He started asking questions after that, nothing direct, but clearly testing whether the man in front of him was behaving like the Alpha he’d known his whole life.
He asked about the council meeting, and Hazel answered well enough, mostly true, filling gaps with confidence where she lacked facts.
Then he asked something more specific, something only the real Aldrien would know, and Hazel glanced toward him helplessly.
Aldrien mouthed the answer fast enough that Wystan almost caught the movement, and Hazel repeated it a beat too quickly.
Wystan’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“And how do you feel about your wife?” he asked next.
Hazel nearly choked on air.
Aldrien’s head turned sharply toward Wystan, and Wystan noticed that too, filing it away with everything else.
Hazel forced herself to answer as Aldrien would, flat and unaffected.
“She’s tolerable.”
Aldrien’s eyebrows shot up so fast Hazel worried they’d give her away entirely.
“Tolerable?” Wystan repeated.
“Very,” Hazel added, nodding.
Wystan gave a strange little nod of his own and turned toward the door, and Hazel let herself breathe for the first time in several minutes.
Then he stopped with his hand on the frame.
“One more thing.”
“Yes?”
“You seem happier,” he said, looking at her.
Hazel’s stomach dropped.
Wystan turned toward Aldrien next, studying him with the same careful attention.
“And you seem angrier.”
Aldrien’s face went perfectly blank, the kind of blank that took real effort to maintain.
Wystan’s mouth curved just slightly.
“Interesting,” he said, and left.
The door clicked shut behind him, and Hazel let out a breath she’d been holding since the moment he walked in.
“He knows,” she said.
“He suspects,” Aldrien corrected.
“That’s worse.”
They finally left the private chamber, and a servant met them almost immediately in the corridor, informing them with a cheerful little bow that the Alpha residence had been prepared.
Hazel assumed that meant separate rooms, some reasonable arrangement that acknowledged they had both, technically, just been through a wedding and a magical catastrophe on the same day.
“Your bedroom is ready, Alpha,” the servant said.
Hazel stopped walking.
“Bedroom?”
“The Alpha’s marital suite,” the servant said, smiling like this was the most natural sentence in the world.
Hazel looked at Aldrien.
Aldrien looked at Hazel.
Neither of them said a single word until the servant had led them all the way to the residence and left them standing in the doorway.
The suite was beautiful, spacious, clearly built for two people who were supposed to want to be there together.
There was one sitting room.
One bathroom.
One enormous bed sitting in the center of the bedroom like it had been placed there specifically to torment them.
“No,” Hazel said.
“Absolutely not,” Aldrien agreed.
Another servant appeared briefly to explain, with far too much cheer, that since the wedding had formally united the two packs, everyone expected the marriage to be consummated that very night.
Hazel’s face burned instantly.
Aldrien’s expression went somewhere close to murderous.
Neither of them could say anything to contradict it without raising exactly the kind of questions they were trying to avoid, so they simply stood there and let the servant leave.
Once the door shut, Hazel pointed at the bed like it had personally wronged her.
“I’m not sleeping there.”
“Neither am I,” Aldrien said, arms crossed.
“Good.”
“Good.”
They stared at each other, and then, at exactly the same moment, both said, “You take the bed,” and stopped.
They argued about it properly after that.
Hazel suggested the couch, and Aldrien pointed out it was barely long enough for a child.
He suggested the floor, and Hazel reminded him he was currently occupying her much smaller frame, which meant he’d survive it fine, except he was arguing from inside his own considerably larger body and would wake up unable to walk.
Eventually they both had to admit there was nowhere else in the entire suite to sleep.
“This is ridiculous,” Hazel muttered, glaring at the bed.
“Our entire situation is ridiculous,” Aldrien said, and she hated that he wasn’t wrong.
The problem got stranger the longer she thought about it.
She was in his body, which meant she was technically about to sleep in his own bed, which felt deeply invasive somehow.
He was in hers, which meant he’d be sleeping in the bed meant for her husband, which he currently was, and also wasn’t, and none of it made sense the more she turned it over.
“You’re not allowed to sleep shirtless,” she said.
He looked at her.
“I’m in your body.”
“Exactly.”
“And you’re in mine.”
She paused.
“That’s not helping.”
He almost smiled.
They ended up drafting rules, absurd and specific, because it felt like the only way either of them would survive the night.
No touching.
No changing in front of each other.
Stay strictly on your own side of the mattress.
Absolutely no commentary on what the other person’s body felt like from the inside.
And if either of them woke in the middle of the night, no panicking.
“That last one is important,” Hazel said.
“You panic easily.”
“I do not.”
“You screamed at your own reflection this morning.”
“Because my reflection was you.”
Eventually they got into bed, an entire ocean of space stretched between them, both facing pointedly in opposite directions.
Sleep refused to come for either of them.
Hazel could hear him breathing, and somewhere in the last two days she’d apparently learned the rhythm of it well enough to notice when it changed.
He shifted his weight, and she stiffened.
“Stop moving.”
“I’m trying to get comfortable.”
“You’re making the whole mattress move.”
“It’s a mattress.”
“You’re annoying.”
“You’ve said that already.”
Silence settled again, and then Hazel’s wolf spoke up, entirely too pleased with herself.
You’re nervous.
I am not, Hazel snapped back silently.
Aldrien’s voice cut through the dark a second later.
“Your wolf thinks you’re nervous.”
Hazel turned over so fast the sheets tangled.
“You can hear her now?”
“Apparently.”
She’s lying, his wolf added helpfully.
“I hate all of you,” Hazel groaned into the pillow.
The room finally went quiet after that, and Hazel lay awake long after his breathing had evened out into something slower and steadier.
She looked over at him in the dark, at her own face gone completely unguarded in sleep, none of the sharp control he usually wore, none of the distance.
Just something quiet and open that she’d never once seen from him while he was awake.
“You’re not as frightening when you’re asleep,” she whispered.
His eyes opened immediately.
“You’re not as annoying when you’re quiet.”
Hazel jolted upright.
“You were awake?”
“Unfortunately.”
She turned away, face burning in the dark, and he closed his eyes again like nothing had happened.
Neither of them said anything else.
But neither of them moved any farther apart either.