Moving Into The Mansion

**POV: Aria**

She packed everything she owned into one bag.

That was the part that hurt the most. Not the leaving. Not the uncertainty sitting on the other side of it like something she could not see clearly enough to prepare for. Just the simple and quietly humiliating fact that everything Aria Voss had accumulated in eighteen years of living fit into a single worn duffel bag with a broken zipper her father had fixed twice with safety pins.

Dorian stood in the doorway of her small bedroom watching her fold the last of her clothes and his eyes were doing that thing they did when he was feeling something large and had decided not to burden her with it.

"Papa," she said without turning around. "Stop looking at me like that."

"Like what," he said quietly.

"Like I am going somewhere I cannot come back from."

He was silent for a moment. "Are you not?"

She turned and looked at him. He looked smaller than usual standing in that doorway, her father who had always been the steadiest thing in any room he occupied. His eyes were soft and a little red at the edges and she crossed the room and hugged him before either of them said anything else because some moments did not need words and this was one of them.

He held on tightly.

"This is not the end of anything," she murmured into his shoulder. "It is the pack mansion. It is ten minutes from here."

"I know where it is," he said. His voice was rough at the edges. "I know exactly where it is and I know what it means and I know you are going to be absolutely fine." A pause. "I just need a minute to catch up to knowing it."

She pulled back and looked at his face and memorized it the way she always did, the lines around his eyes and the gray at his temples and the particular steadiness in his expression that had gotten her through more bad days than she could count.

"I will see you in three days," she said. "Luna Sera already agreed to it."

He nodded and straightened and became her father again, dignified and gentle and quietly certain of her even when she could not locate that certainty in herself. He picked up her bag and carried it to the door and handed it to the pack member Alpha Ryker had sent to collect her without saying another word because Dorian Voss had always understood that some goodbyes were better kept short.

She walked out of the cottage without looking back.

The Silvermoor mansion was everything the Voss cottage was not.

It rose at the end of a long stone path lined with trees so old they had grown into each other overhead, their branches forming a canopy that filtered the afternoon light into something golden and cathedral quiet. The building itself was gray stone and dark wood and enormous windows that reflected the sky in itself. It smelled like pine and something older underneath that, something that had been accumulating authority and history for generations before Aria was born.

She stood at the entrance and took one full breath.

Luna Sera met her at the door with a warmth that felt entirely genuine and completely unhurried, like she had been looking forward to this moment and was not going to rush through it. She walked Aria through the entrance hall and up a wide staircase and down a corridor that felt longer than her entire cottage and opened a door at the end of it.

The room was three times the size of her bedroom at home.

Aria stood in the middle of it and looked at the high ceiling and the wide window overlooking the forest and the bed that was larger than any furniture she had ever personally owned and felt the full strange weight of being somewhere she did not belong yet.

"I know it feels like a lot," Luna Sera said from the doorway, reading her with the quiet accuracy of a woman who paid attention to people. "Give it a few days. Spaces become ordinary faster than you expect."

Aria nodded and thanked her and meant both.

She was unpacking her single bag into the enormous wardrobe, arranging her small collection of clothes across hangers that probably cost more than her shoes, when the knock came at the door. She opened it expecting Luna Sera and found Caden instead.

He leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed and his grey eyes moved past her into the room with the quick automatic assessment of someone who had grown up measuring spaces and people in equal measure.

"You settled in," he said.

"I just arrived," she said.

"I know." His eyes came back to her face. "My mother put you in the east wing."

"Is that a problem?"

"No." The word came out evenly. "My rooms are also in the east wing."

The silence that followed was extremely aware of itself and neither of them did anything useful with it for several seconds.

Aria kept her expression steady even though the bond had registered his proximity immediately and was now conducting a full and enthusiastic response in her chest that she was doing her absolute best to ignore. "I did not choose the room," she said. "Your mother did."

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile but in the neighborhood of one. "I am aware. I am not complaining."

She blinked. She had not expected that.

He pushed off the doorframe and straightened to his full height. "Dinner is at seven. My father expects everyone at the table." He turned to leave and stopped. "And Aria." Her name in his mouth carried a weight she still had no proper response to. "Lock your door tonight."

She frowned. "Why?"

He looked back at her and his grey eyes were completely serious. "Because not everyone in this house is glad you are here and I need to know you are being careful even in the moments I am not standing next to you."

He walked away before she could find a single word to answer with.

She stood in the doorway watching him disappear down the corridor and the bond pulled after him the way it always did, warm and persistent and entirely unbothered by her feelings about it.

She closed the door.

She turned the lock.

She sat on the edge of the enormous bed and looked at her single worn bag at the bottom of the wardrobe and felt the distance between where she was and everything familiar settle around her like something physical.

Her phone buzzed.

Mara. A voice note.

"You'd better call me the second anything happens over there. I mean anything at all. If Caden Silvermoor so much as looks at you sideways I want a full detailed report. Also, I asked around about that unknown number that messaged you after the ceremony and Aria I think you really need to be careful because someone told me that"

The voice note cut off.

Aria pressed play again immediately.

Nothing. Corrupted mid-sentence.

She called Mara back.

Seven rings. Voicemail.