Aldrien woke in Hazel’s body already irritated by the sheer number of decisions required just to leave the room.
Her hair alone took longer than his entire morning routine, and by the time he’d fought his way through a wardrobe full of buttons and clasps he didn’t understand, he’d decided that whatever her day held, it couldn’t possibly compare to the weight he’d carried the day before.
Then Evangeline arrived with a schedule in hand.
A breakfast with influential pack women.
A visit to the healer’s quarters.
A charity event.
A meeting with several families over some ongoing grievance.
A social luncheon.
An evening gathering to close it all out.
He stared at the list.
“This is my day?”
Evangeline smiled, entirely too pleased with herself.
“This is a quiet day.”
He regretted every assumption he’d made about Hazel’s schedule almost immediately.
Breakfast wasn’t the gossip he’d braced for.
Instead he found himself surrounded by women discussing real problems, a warrior’s wife struggling to manage while her husband recovered from an injury, a family who couldn’t afford medicine, a cluster of younger wolves with nowhere safe to train.
Someone turned to him and asked him to mediate a disagreement between two households that had apparently been simmering for a month.
He’d assumed someone else usually handled things like this.
It became clear fairly quickly that people simply came to Hazel, because she remembered their families, remembered their problems, and always seemed to know who needed help before they’d worked up the nerve to ask.
He answered carefully, weighing every word before he said it, and Evangeline noticed the shift.
“You’re listening today,” she said.
“People seem to have a lot to say.”
Evangeline smiled at that, like it was a familiar sentence coming from an unfamiliar place.
The healer’s quarters were where things stopped feeling manageable.
The healer greeted him warmly and thanked him before he’d even sat down.
“Thank you for convincing the Alpha to approve the additional medicine,” she said.
Aldrien froze.
“What?”
The healer explained that he’d quietly petitioned the Alpha weeks earlier about the healers running low on supplies, and had pushed for the funding without ever taking credit for it.
He had genuinely never heard about any of it, not from this side of things.
The healer kept talking, mentioning how often he visited injured warriors, how he checked in on their families without being asked, and Aldrien realized this wasn’t a single act of kindness he’d simply missed.
It had been happening for a long time, quietly, in the spaces he’d never bothered to look.
A young girl found him shortly after, the daughter of one of the injured warriors, and threw her arms around him before he could brace for it.
She thanked him for the books, and he had no idea what she meant until she explained, bright and excited, that he sent her stories whenever her father was away on patrol.
“Mother says you’re very kind,” the girl added.
Aldrien looked down at the unfamiliar hands he was currently wearing and felt something uncomfortable settle in his chest, something that had nothing to do with the strangeness of the body itself.
He was learning things about Hazel that Hazel had never once mentioned to him, and it left him feeling like he’d been standing next to a whole person for years without ever actually seeing her.
The family dispute that afternoon nearly went badly before he’d even started.
Both sides were furious, neither willing to give an inch, and Aldrien fell back on the only method he knew, giving orders, expecting compliance the way he always got it in the council chamber.
Nobody listened.
Evangeline leaned in quietly.
“That’s not how you usually do it.”
He stopped and actually watched for a moment instead of pushing forward, and understood, slowly, that Hazel didn’t solve these things by commanding anyone.
She made people feel like they’d actually been heard.
He changed course, stopped trying to decide who was right, and instead asked both families what they actually wanted out of this.
It took longer, and it felt strange, letting people talk instead of simply deciding for them, but they landed on a compromise eventually, and one of the women looked at him with genuine relief.
“Thank you, Luna.”
Something shifted in him at that.
Hazel’s strength wasn’t his strength.
It never had been.
The luncheon was where the sheer scale of it finally hit him.
Everyone expected him to smile, to remember every name in the room, to smooth over arguments before they became arguments, to represent his family, to make every single person feel important, to maintain a hundred relationships at once, to know everyone’s personal troubles, and to never once show any sign of exhaustion while doing it.
Unlike his own meetings, there was no clear beginning or end to any of it.
It simply never stopped.
He’d dismissed Hazel’s responsibilities as frivolous more times than he could count, and sitting through this single day made it obvious how wrong he’d been.
This was diplomacy too.
It just didn’t come with a title attached to it.
On the ride home, Evangeline studied him with narrowed eyes.
“What’s wrong with you today?”
“Nothing,” he said, too quickly.
“You’re thinking too much.”
He didn’t answer that.
She kept watching him.
“You usually complain about all of this by now,” she said.
He looked out the window instead of at her.
“Maybe I don’t complain because it matters to me.”
Evangeline went quiet after that, and something in her expression told him the answer had sounded strange coming from her friend, though she couldn’t have said exactly why.
Before the day ended, an elderly woman stopped him in the corridor and took his hand.
“Thank you,” she said. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
“For my grandson’s training fees. I only just found out it was you.”
Aldrien had no idea what she meant until she kept going, and he realized, listening, that Hazel had quietly paid for it months ago and never told a soul, not even the family she’d helped.
“It wasn’t a big deal,” he said, doing his best to sound like her.
The woman smiled.
“That’s exactly why you’re special.”
That sentence stayed with him the rest of the walk home.
When he reached the Alpha residence, Hazel was already there, sitting at the table complaining about the pile of reports she’d survived that day.
He watched her for a moment before saying anything, thinking about how she’d told him yesterday that he was a good Alpha, and understanding now that she was carrying her own version of that same weight.
Hers simply didn’t come with a title, or a chamber full of people standing when she entered.
“You do a lot,” he said.
She eyed him warily.
“What did you break?”
He almost laughed.
“Nothing.”
He told her about the healer, the little girl and her books, the elderly woman and her grandson.
Hazel’s face went red almost immediately, and she tried to wave it all off.
“They’re pack members,” she said.
“Someone had to help.”
“You never told me.”
She shrugged, like it genuinely hadn’t occurred to her that it mattered.
“Why would I?”
And that, more than anything else that day, was what stayed with him.
She hadn’t been doing any of it for praise.
She hadn’t even been doing it to be noticed at all.
He watched her walk off toward the other room, and his wolf spoke up quietly in the silence she left behind.
She’s not what you thought.
He didn’t answer.
You like her, his wolf added.
I respect her, he thought back, firm and immediate.
That’s what you called it yesterday, his wolf said.
He went still at that, because he remembered exactly what he’d felt watching her sit in his chair the day before, surrounded by his reports, carrying his responsibilities without complaint.
Today she had done the same thing to him, without even trying.
He looked toward the doorway where she’d disappeared and thought, for the first time in years, that he had never actually known her at all.